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emailspam-preventionspam

Is it still worth obfuscating email-addresses to prevent harvesting?

I was wondering, is it really worth the trouble to implement email-obfuscation techniques in order to prevent emails from being harvested these days? My initial thought is no but i might be wrong. My (possibly inaccurate) arguments:

  • spam filtering and detection is superior these days (when looking at my gmail spambox over 90% of all mail i receive is spam but none ends up in my inbox). Is it safe to assume the same for most other email services?
  • most techniques aren't 100% proof against advanced harvesting scripts so all effort could be in vain.

You might argue that it's no trouble to obfuscate an e-mail address but i notice a lot of our clients enter their e-mail addresses through our CMS which thus requires me to filter out the e-mail adresses from the text and replace it with an obfuscated version which obviously is a little more trouble.

I'd like to hear from other people wondering the same or actually proving me wrong :)

Solution

  • If it's your address, you can do whatever you see fit.

    If it's not your address, you might want to ask the owners. (Or check DNS to see if it's hosted on Google Apps)

    As I described here, it is possible to block even the most advanced harvesters. (Unless they specifically target your site and work with the script)