Re: Website request (anti-spam)

[Crispin Murphy <crispin@myra.com>]

Gero Kuhlmann wrote:

>>I note that many other mailinglist archives are replacing the @ sign 
>>with '_at_'. See 
>>http://www.caucho.com/support/resin-interest/0203/0356.html for an 
>>alternative presentation.
>>    
>>
>
>Well, it could easily be done to search the archive with _at_ instead
>of @ in order to gather email addresses. Therefore, I don't see a real
>advantage. I think, the only thing to do about spam is to publish the
>email address in the form of a small graphic because it would be too
>difficult to parse those. But this would be very difficult to implement
>into a text based mailing list archive.
>
At this point the spammers are not parsing email addresses with 
anti-spam transforms.  See the previous link regarding what sort of 
activity generates the most spam.   Posts to well traveled newsgroups 
and addresses posted plaintext on the web generated the most (spam). 
Removing or obfuscating the addresses significantly reduced the amount 
of spam within a week or two.

It is true that any obfuscations made by algorithmic methods are 
generally reversible so in the long run this may not be an effective 
deterrant.  One would need to generate a hash of the email address which 
would be useless as de-obfuscation would require a brute force search. 

On the other hand, if everyone is doing something slightly different, it 
makes the spammers job much harder to do, thus reducing spam.

Crispin


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