Does e-mail obfuscation really make automatic harvesting harder?

Question

Many users and forum programs in attempt to make automatic e-mail address harversting harder conseal them via obfuscation - @ is replaced with "at" and . is replaced with "dot", so

 team@stackoverflow.com

now becomes

team at stackoverflow dot com

I'm not an expert in regular expressions and I'm really curious - does such obfuscation really make automatic harvesting harder? Is it really much harder to automatically identify such obfuscated addresses?

Answer 1

Definitely!

I read this article a while ago which shows how effective (as well as the relative degree) the various methods can be. Reversing an already reversed string seems to be fairly decent protection at the moment.

The following code sample:

<style type="text/css">
   span.codedirection { unicode-bidi:bidi-override; direction: rtl; }
</style>

<p><span class="codedirection">moc.etalllit@7raboofnavlis</span></p>

Will output the email so it's readable at least.

That said, it is almost an arms race. But as long at you're ahead of the curve, it'll be more effort to harvest your address rather than ordinary un-obfuscated ones.