Out of the corner of my eye

I’ve read plenty of articles about email obfuscation over the years. Until I got an email address with decent spam protection, I occasionally made a half arsed effort at it too - the old davedx at gmail dot com. That was before I knew much about how powerful web scripting had become.

Email obfuscation is rubbish. Given time, I expect any obfuscation technique will be added to the scripts used by harvester bots that build their email databases to be sold to spammers. The only methods I believe work at preventing most spam are:

1. A decent spam filter

2. CAPTCHA (for web form/comment spam)

Here’s a script I wrote, that took me about 30 mins of googling to find the most popular obfuscation techniques (the ones most people linked to, bumping to the top of the search results, and are therefore probably using themselves), then 1hr 15 to write the actual code.

Email obfuscation breaker (rename to .php)

Here’s a testbed, proving it works.

The hardest part was plugging in the JavaScript interpreter - none of it was rocket science, however.

If your email doesn’t have decent spam filtering, don’t post it on public web sites.