Anti-Spam email address encoders | September 3, 2003

Dan Benjamin of Hivelogic has just updated his Anti-Spam Email Address Enkoder.

I first came across the idea of email encoders through an article by Dan at A List Apart a while back.

The idea is basically an attempt to fool email address harvesters by converting your address into HTML characters and then printing this out using javascript.

If this method starts to become popular, which it looks like it is, I'm sure the spammers will up the arms race and this method will become less useful. However with the amount of spam bots kicking about these days, if you run your own site it's probably worth protecting your email address one way or another.

Posted at September 3, 2003 10:00 AM

Comments on: Anti-Spam email address encoders

Jump to the comment form

 speach bubble Comment

You make a good point. See:

http://dreamweaverfever.com/experiments/spam/

and

http://dreamweaverfever.com/experiments/spam/hivedetect.asp

as examples of how the spammers can overcome such techniques.

Posted by: Drew McLellan at September 4, 2003 9:58 PM

 speach bubble Comment

Damn tricksy buggers aren’t they!

Posted by: Andy Budd at September 5, 2003 9:34 PM