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Subject:Possible Anti-Spam Measures From:eric -dot- dunn -at- ca -dot- transport -dot- bombardier -dot- com To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Thu, 30 Oct 2003 12:36:42 -0500
After reading a recent Woody's Office Watch (WOW #8.43), I was wondering hoe
effective the proposed approach of modifying email addresses in the HTML source
code was.
Basically, it's a take on the old joe_AT_work_DOTcom email address modification
technique. But, it has the distinct advantage of being displayed unaltered and
is completely functional in links.
While the initial suggestion of replacing "@" with "%40" and "." with "%2e"
(From http://i-technica.com/whitestuff/urlencodechart.html ) is interesting and
probably sufficient, the result from the freeware encoder ( http://natata.hn3.net/antispam_encoder.htm) is impressive. My email is:
eric.dunn@ca.transport.bombardier.com
.
But it struck me that this type of 'solution' would only buy sometime. Do others
think that the e-mail harvesters would change to look for such 'hidden' e-mails?
Perhaps substitution of just a couple of characters is more difficult to pattern
match.
The other thing that crossed my mind is would it be possible to use custom
entity declarations to do the same thing? That way the spammers really couldn't
decipher the addresses unless they also looked for and analysed entity
declarations.
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