On Tue, 6 Apr 2021 11:31:29 +0500 "Alexander V. Makartsev" <avbe...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 06.04.2021 01:14, Celejar wrote: > >> On Mon, 5 Apr 2021 15:51:28 -0400 > >> Dan Ritter <d...@randomstring.org> wrote: > >> Because it doesn't work. If it worked as well as, say, moving your > >> SSH port*, I would encourage it. It does not. > > Source? Is this your personal experience, or do you have some other > > basis for this? Cloudflare, for example, asserts that: > > > > "Cloudflare Email Address Obfuscation helps in spam prevention by > > hiding email addresses appearing in your pages from email harvesters > > and other bots, while remaining visible to your site visitors." > > > I think you see spam problem from the wrong perspective. > You might think "spammer" is a person with some home brewed script that > pray upon unsuspecting web-sites. I understand that they use sophisticated bots, not home-brewed scripts. > Spam is a whole industry and there are large spam groups who make profit > from spam alone. They are capable to create private and commercial > applications for data-mining and constantly update them with new tricks > to fight new obfuscation methods for an example. > They use collected data to create databases of emails (categorize them, > add country\area information, etc) which later could be traded among > spam community members and\or sold to companies who want to implement > aggressive advertisements. > So once your email, even if it was obfuscated, gets into said databases > there is no escape from spam. > This is the reason why obfuscation doesn't work. I understand your points, but at the end of the day, it still seems plausible to me that obfuscation could reduce (not eliminate, of course) the prevalence of a posted address in their various lists. I have a number of email addresses, and some get a lot more spam than others, so there's apparently no one central, authoritative spammer list that all email addresses quickly end up on. I do understand the consensus here, though, of people with more experience than I have, that obfuscation today is of little or no value. Here are some other discussions of the question I've come across, although some are ancient: https://www.w3.org/blog/systeam/2008/09/11/email_address_obfuscation/ https://stackoverflow.com/questions/748780/best-way-to-obfuscate-an-e-mail-address-on-a-website https://blog.mailtrap.io/email-obfuscation/ Celejar
