Most of the time when I see someone post their email address online, especially if it’s a personal address, they use something like
me [at] example [dot] com
instead of the actual email address ([email protected]). Even top members of this community use similar styles in their profiles:
jt.superuser[AT]gmail[DOT]com
quixote dot su over yonder near that gmail place
The typical rationale is that this kind of obfuscation prevents the email address from being automatically recognized and harvested by spammers. In an age where spammers can beat all but the most diabolical captchas, is this really true? And given how effective modern spam filters are, does it really matter if your email address is harvested?
var m = 'xyz'; // you can use any clever method of m += '@';
// creating the string containing the email m += 'example.com';
// and then add it to the DOM (eg, via $('.email).append(m); // jquery)
There was an interesting article by Cory Doctorow recently on this subject here which argued that email obfuscation doesn’t serve much purpose, and a more optimal approach is intelligently managing the spam you get. TL;DR version:
The objective of this entire exercise is not to reduce the amount of spam you get in your email, but the amount of spam you manually have to remove from your inbox.
Email obfuscation is a constant battle to come up with ever sophisticated bot-proof, human-readable encoding, and is a drain on the productivity of both the creator, and the correspondent.
“Almost any email address that you use for any length of time eventually becomes widely enough known that you should assume all the spammers have it.”
“The convenience of stable, easily copy-pastable email addresses” wins over trying to hide from the spambots.
