Re: Modern best practice for putting a contact email on the web
On Tue, 6 Apr 2021 11:31:29 +0500
"Alexander V. Makartsev" <avbetev@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 06.04.2021 01:14, Celejar wrote:
> >> On Mon, 5 Apr 2021 15:51:28 -0400
> >> Dan Ritter <dsr@randomstring.org> wrote:
> >> Because it doesn't work. If it worked as well as, say, moving your
> >> SSH port*, I would encourage it. It does not.
> > Source? Is this your personal experience, or do you have some other
> > basis for this? Cloudflare, for example, asserts that:
> >
> > "Cloudflare Email Address Obfuscation helps in spam prevention by
> > hiding email addresses appearing in your pages from email harvesters
> > and other bots, while remaining visible to your site visitors."
> >
> I think you see spam problem from the wrong perspective.
> You might think "spammer" is a person with some home brewed script that
> pray upon unsuspecting web-sites.
I understand that they use sophisticated bots, not home-brewed scripts.
> Spam is a whole industry and there are large spam groups who make profit
> from spam alone. They are capable to create private and commercial
> applications for data-mining and constantly update them with new tricks
> to fight new obfuscation methods for an example.
> They use collected data to create databases of emails (categorize them,
> add country\area information, etc) which later could be traded among
> spam community members and\or sold to companies who want to implement
> aggressive advertisements.
> So once your email, even if it was obfuscated, gets into said databases
> there is no escape from spam.
> This is the reason why obfuscation doesn't work.
I understand your points, but at the end of the day, it still seems
plausible to me that obfuscation could reduce (not eliminate, of
course) the prevalence of a posted address in their various lists. I
have a number of email addresses, and some get a lot more spam than
others, so there's apparently no one central, authoritative spammer
list that all email addresses quickly end up on.
I do understand the consensus here, though, of people with more
experience than I have, that obfuscation today is of little or no
value. Here are some other discussions of the question I've come
across, although some are ancient:
https://www.w3.org/blog/systeam/2008/09/11/email_address_obfuscation/
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/748780/best-way-to-obfuscate-an-e-mail-address-on-a-website
https://blog.mailtrap.io/email-obfuscation/
Celejar
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