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ob`fus`cate: To make so confused or opaque as to be difficult to perceive or understand |
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What is Email Obfuscation?
You may want to consider an email obfuscation tool which helps to reduce the risk of exposing email addresses to email abuse from spammers.
Spammers use programs known as "spambots" that crawl the internet looking for email addresses located on websites. When they locate these email address they are sold or circulated to people and organisations who want to send unsolicited emails.
The Email Obfuscation tool obfuscates your email address therefore making the link work for people viewing your website but not for spambots.
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Our RecommendationWe recommend using an email obfuscation tool that not only offers HTML encoding but also JavaScript. The JavaScript obfuscation option is more secure than normal HTML encoding and provides a higher level of obfuscation.
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Does Obfuscation Work?
Obfuscation is not 100% foolproof. The best defence remains good spam tools at your mail server and desktop as well as using JavaScript encoding, which is about as secure as you can get and still make the email address available.
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FYI : Differing opinions about the success of obfuscation
Below are some articles for your reference featuring the various opinions about the success of obfuscation.
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Opinion One: Obfuscation Helps SpammersAlthough we don't totally agree with this point of view about obfuscation the article is straight to the point. http://typewriting.org/2006/06/19/Email_Obfuscation_Helps_Spammers |
Opinion Two: Obfuscation Doesn't Stop Spammers
This article outlines all the options and then points out that email gathering tools use the same technique to un-obfuscate the address. Any software developer with a dark side could write codes to do exactly this. To harvest an email address you only need to search for the string [anything]@[anything].[anything] or, if obfuscated; mailto:a@a.com http://www.december14.net/ways/js/nospam.shtml
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Opinion Three: Obfuscation Does WorkThis article argues that obfuscation does work, if done using CSS. This takes a scientific approach and real tests to get an answer to this question. Remember that CSS inline style changes are not always supported in all browsers and requires a fair level of effort for each email address. Also the results count between the CSS method and JavaScript is minimal.
http://techblog.tilllate.com/2008/07/20/ten-methods-to-obfuscate-e-mail-addresses-compared/ |
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