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Protecting your email with 'AT domain DOT com' is making it easier to find

varenhor.st

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Re: Protecting your email with 'AT domain DOT com' is making it easier to find

#31

Post by philwelch »

sharpn wrote: post #25
aarongough wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When using Gmail I have a bunch of filters that make it easier to read through my spam mail. For instance: IF X email is in the spam folder AND contains any of the words (Cialis, Viagra, Rolex, etc...) -> Move it immediately to the trash. This cuts down the number of emails that stay in my spam folder by a huge margin, and makes it much easier to check for false positives. That being said, I no longer even bother che…

so if someone includes the word 'specialist' in an email to you, you would never see it. spe cialis t

Yes, the Scunthorpe problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

Re: Protecting your email with 'AT domain DOT com' is making it easier to find

#32

Post by sp332 »

tome wrote: post #9
olalonde wrote: post #2

Whatever, I never get spam with Gmail.

How do you know Gmail doesn't misclassify valid mail as spam? This is what terrifies me about the thought of using a spam filter: false positives.

It hardly ever happens. Real-world example: http://twitter.com/textfiles/status/6234139001

Re: Protecting your email with 'AT domain DOT com' is making it easier to find

#35

Post by varenc »

olalonde wrote: post #2

Whatever, I never get spam with Gmail.

Me neither! One of the points I try to make at the end of post though is since gmail seems to stop all spam anyway, lets all just start using a nice readable email address on the internet.

Re: Protecting your email with 'AT domain DOT com' is making it easier to find

#36

Post by prawn »

sjs382 wrote: post #18
tome wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know Gmail doesn't misclassify valid mail as spam? This is what terrifies me about the thought of using a spam filter: false positives.

I don't know, but I don't sweat it either. Anyone who is sending me super-important email has other ways of contacting me if they don't get a response. And in the case that they dont, a missed email still isn't the end of the world.

If you rely on business leads where the sender is also contacting competitors, those "others ways" won't always matter and you'll just miss the job. That's my concern.

That said, I openly list my email address online (and have with the same address for 12+ years) and have really average filtering that leaves me deleting spam that slips through and chasing down false positives.

Re: Protecting your email with 'AT domain DOT com' is making it easier to find

#37

Post by sokoloff »

notaddicted wrote: post #21
tome wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know Gmail doesn't misclassify valid mail as spam? This is what terrifies me about the thought of using a spam filter: false positives.

For about 1 year I checked my spam folder. After never seeing a false positive, and only 1 or 2 spam in my inbox, I stopped checking. aside: for poor man's obfuscation (like in my HN profile) I do jhl805atgmaildotcom ... my belief is that this is hard to extract automatically.

If the regexp:

  ([^\s]+)\s*[Aa][Tt] *([^\s]+)\s*[Dd][Oo][Tt]\s*[Cc][Oo][Mm]
matches text in an exemplar, it's worth checking out as a possible email address (assuming one is a low-down, good-for-nothing spammer)

Yours is no harder to pull out automatically than the examples in the original article, and the above regexp took me under 2 minutes to write and verify. It's not your "obfuscation" that's saving you, it's gmail's spam filtering.

Re: Protecting your email with 'AT domain DOT com' is making it easier to find

#38

Post by RK »

sharpn wrote: post #25
aarongough wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When using Gmail I have a bunch of filters that make it easier to read through my spam mail. For instance: IF X email is in the spam folder AND contains any of the words (Cialis, Viagra, Rolex, etc...) -> Move it immediately to the trash. This cuts down the number of emails that stay in my spam folder by a huge margin, and makes it much easier to check for false positives. That being said, I no longer even bother che…

so if someone includes the word 'specialist' in an email to you, you would never see it. spe cialis t

After college I worked as a network administrator for a doctors office that dealt with pain medications. We constantly had problems with work mail going to the spam folder when it actually concerned drugs like Vicodin.

Re: Protecting your email with 'AT domain DOT com' is making it easier to find

#39

Post by xtho »

eli wrote: post #5
eli wrote: post #4

My experience shows that simple bots looking for mailto: links still work just fine. I doubt many spammers are going to go through the trouble of decoding even simple obfuscation. There used to be a website where a guy actually tried different methods for posting an email address on the web and then measured the number of junk messages at each address. Wish I could remember where I saw it.

Here it is: http://techblog.tilllate.com/2008/07/20/ten-methods-to-obfus... A bit dated now, but using AT and DOT cut the spam to basically negligible levels.

It's quite interesting that the javascript-version got more spam than the simple AT/DOT one. That's surprising---at least to me it is.

Re: Protecting your email with 'AT domain DOT com' is making it easier to find

#40

Post by miles »

varenc wrote: post #35
olalonde wrote: post #2

Whatever, I never get spam with Gmail.

Me neither! One of the points I try to make at the end of post though is since gmail seems to stop all spam anyway, lets all just start using a nice readable email address on the internet.

From your article:

Its pretty well established that “email AT domain DOT com” offers only marginal protection from spammers

And yet the 1.5 year experiment pointed out by eli indicates that this form of obfuscation is among the most effective ways to avoid spam:

http://techblog.tilllate.com/2008/07/20/ten-methods-to-obfus...

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