Email Obfuscation

[sweetjesus26]

I’ve been thinking about email obfuscation, mainly because we had a meeting about it at work. My initial thoughts are: “ Is it effective?”, “ Is it worth it?” and “ How long will it last?”
Is it effective?

Somewhat. Obfuscation’s effectiveness seems to largely rest on what method you use.

Simple schemes have already been broken. For the big

Comments

Accessibility

[sweetjesus26]

I didn't touch on accessibility, may attack that later.

[theducks]

As always, all obfuscation methods should be evaluated against http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

I think we're on the same page here - my view is that harvesting emails for spam is a fact of life, and that its consequences should be dealt with using a multi-layered approach involving anti-spam systems and prosecutions.

[ext_2025]

Grahame has done some honeypot stuff I think.

[sweetjesus26]

Yes, I was planning on looking into that again. It's called gaisde. He puts an invisible honeypot address (embedded with remote IP and signed to ensure validity) on his meme generator which is linked to by several blogs and possibly other places. Grahame's website is linked fairly well throughout the web.

I'll probably pinch the code to set up my honeypot. :-)

Home users can use a tool for email obfuscation

[ext_122608]

For Mac OS X users there's a convenient Dashboard widget called obfuscatr. It provides JavaScript or just plain hexadecimal encoding (not so effective) of your email addy. See the details at flash tekkie.

obfuscatr was also featured in MacWorld Italy of March 2008.