Comments on: Stop obfuscating your email address!

By: reader

reader — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 17:46:45 +0000

Dilligaff? If you consider yourself too go(o)d for it, you’re not worth _my_ time.

By: Nadav Elyada

Nadav Elyada — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 17:28:29 +0000

Good points. For most audiences, the “name at domain dot com” format is totally inappropriate. I also wouldn’t underestimate the ability of spambots to extract email addresses that have undergone such lame obfuscation.

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By: Dave Ward

Dave Ward — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 16:47:33 +0000

I couldn’t agree more. My primary email address has been publicly displayed my site for years, unobfuscated. I spend very little time worrying about or dealing with automated junk mail.

Using such an arbitrary “test” as a gating mechanism is misguided at best.

By: Pykler

Pykler — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 15:27:46 +0000

I am not saying I do not get spam, but obfuscating your email of some sort may slow down spam. I find the better approach is to use JS obfuscation, where the email address is still quite visible yet crawlers would have a hard time finding it.

By: Justin

Justin — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 15:19:25 +0000

I agree. More annoying yet is a website I use frequently which even encodes emails entered into private messages between users – the messages are never displayed publicly, never indexed by search engines, yet when you send someone a message any address is replaced with name [!at] example.com. It’s a high example of pointless and lazy programming.

By: deb

deb — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 15:02:51 +0000

Agreed. If you don’t have a full blown contact form on ur site, atleast you should have the email ID mailto: linked so that the visitor can right click -> copy email address & put that in their gmail or desktop email program or whatever.

Why loose the slight chance that might have crossed the visitor’s mind to contact you by having a difficult to understand/find contact info.

By: Stu Thompson

Stu Thompson — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 14:26:30 +0000

Here, here!

I’ve been of the same opinion for a few years now. It is almost humorous how many times folks have asked me in wide-eyed awe questions like “don’t you worry about spam?” or “don’t you worry about your privacy?”

And I very much believe that a real name associated with what one posts on the Internet, and a contact address, adds a non-trivial degree of credibility.

Great post.

Cheers,

Stu Thompson
stu@thompson.name

By: matthias

matthias — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 14:09:12 +0000

I actually like to make it slightly more difficult to contact me. I just use a picture of the email address. Not only does it cut down on spam, it also cuts down email to people who really want to contact me. If typing in the address is too much work – well, then, it probably wasn’t important enough.

By: Varun Mahajan

Varun Mahajan — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 14:00:54 +0000

The biggest obfuscation is done by Facebook.They change it into an image!!

By: Sebastian Hoitz

Sebastian Hoitz — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 13:00:09 +0000

Hi! That are exactly the same thoughts i have about publishing my E-Mail address. It is just a lot more friendlier for the user to just click on that link than to manually open the E-Mail app, pasting the address and then correcting it to be valid.

However you have to have good anti-spam defense set up anyways otherwise you are lost in todays world.

Nice post!