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Protecting your email address via SVG instead of JavaScript

rouninmedia.github.io

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Re: Protecting your email address via SVG instead of JavaScript

#11

Post by dannyobrien »

I would like to push back on the idea that you should obfuscate your email address at all.

My email addreas is danny@spesh.com. I get a lot of spam -- possibly, since I have been distributing that address deliberately on the web and inadvertently in hacked datadumps, a near maximum amount of spam.

But the benefits of having people easily find a way to contact me directly has for me far outweighed the (largely solved) challenge of discarding automated spam.

Publish your email address! It's okay! Very little bad will happen, and people will be able contact you without going through some strange social media intermediary!

Re: Protecting your email address via SVG instead of JavaScript

#12

Post by ale42 »

okasaki wrote: post #7

Is it still necessary to obfuscate email addresses? Mine isn't and I get around 50 generic spam emails per month to gmail.

I think that nowadays most spam lists come from data breaches and address-collecting malware. It's cheaper than running a bot to scan the web for addresses. We get spam on addresses that were never published online.

Re: Protecting your email address via SVG instead of JavaScript

#14

Post by martyvis »

okasaki wrote: post #7

Is it still necessary to obfuscate email addresses? Mine isn't and I get around 50 generic spam emails per month to gmail.

Is that all. I get around 70 genuine spam emails to my Gmail account every day now (all detected correctly by Gmail)

Re: Protecting your email address via SVG instead of JavaScript

#16

Post by RaoulP »

okasaki wrote: post #7

Is it still necessary to obfuscate email addresses? Mine isn't and I get around 50 generic spam emails per month to gmail.

I think this is a valid question. I see lots of effort at obfuscation but don't know if there's still a need.

I barely get spam and have a bigger issue with false positives in my spam folder. On the other hand I don't think there are many pages on the web that display my email address, so I'm curious about others' experience.

Re: Protecting your email address via SVG instead of JavaScript

#17

Post by tempestn »

martyvis wrote: post #14
okasaki wrote: post #7

Is it still necessary to obfuscate email addresses? Mine isn't and I get around 50 generic spam emails per month to gmail.

Is that all. I get around 70 genuine spam emails to my Gmail account every day now (all detected correctly by Gmail)

I get a similar volume, and gmail likely detects almost all of them. Problem is, it also falsely detects the occasional non-spam message, so I do need to periodically scan through the spam box, which is a bit of a pain when it contains hundreds or thousands of emails.

Re: Protecting your email address via SVG instead of JavaScript

#18

Post by RaoulP »

ale42 wrote: post #12
okasaki wrote: post #7

Is it still necessary to obfuscate email addresses? Mine isn't and I get around 50 generic spam emails per month to gmail.

I think that nowadays most spam lists come from data breaches and address-collecting malware. It's cheaper than running a bot to scan the web for addresses. We get spam on addresses that were never published online.

I think so too. And I think the majority of data breaches that have lead to spam for me are from ages ago, from random services I signed up for as a teenager.

For a few years after that I did the "+" Gmail alias thing, to try to filter and catch companies. But I realised that's easy and obvious to strip, so it wasn't worth the effort (although I have caught PayPal leaking my email somehow).

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