When you put your email address on the internet (eg.
jitesh@example.com), there is a chance that your address is mined for
spamming. Spam-bots crawl the internet day-and-night to mine email
addresses for spamming. Now, you can do something to prevent a spam
bot reading your email address. The key factor here is that an
automated BOT is going to scan the pages, so it is easy to fool it. Or
is it?
A very common form of obfuscation is to spell out the special
characters. eg. jitesh AT example DOT com. Note that this is infact a
very weak form of obfuscation. Because, you are simply changing the
syntax of writing your email address and hence, the bot-writer has to
just add one more grammar to his list of rules and he is done.
Ofcourse, bot-writers are not so stupid as to miss this simple change.
What you need is a semantic change which is impossible (or extremely
hard to be practical) for the bots to infer. But, humans can do it
easily. eg. I might obfuscate my address as : my-first-name AT example
DOT com
Note that: "my-first-name" here is a semantic change. Only a human can
infer that this is to be replaced by "jitesh". This is REAL
obfuscation.
So guys, if you have a non-gmail account with a sucky spam filter,
make your obfuscation stronger and do NOT underestimate spammers :-)
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