Scott Bush

Raise your hand if you’ve ever got some mail offering you a mortgage, degree, medication, stock tips, enlargement of a certain male body part, OEM software, etc. What? Everyone? Keep your hands in the air if you get more than one a day… okay, how about five per day? 10? Two dozen or more? Wow.

If you’ve been living under a rock, you may not know that stuff is called spam, and it’s the bane of everyone’s existence; much more so if you happen to maintain a mail server. How can we cope? Well, first off, don’t buy anything from such messages. You scoff, but people do or it wouldn’t continue. Other than that, you can obfuscate your address.

Address obfuscation, translated into English, is a way to hide your e-mail address in the code of web pages where it may appear (such as your blog, company site, etc.). This can be done many ways with varying levels of sophistication. Recently, I transitioned my organization’s web sites from out-in-the-open addressing to the simplest obfuscation: HTML entities. An example will make this clear:

joe@hotmail.com becomes
joe@hot »
mail.com

That may look like a huge mess (and it is to our eyes), but when a web browser (such as the one you’re using to read this) sees it, it displays the familiar English-text e-mail address. Looks the same, works the same unless you’re an e-mail harvester program crawling the web, in which case you see the HTML entities and don’t recognize them. You are denied the evil pleasures of spamming me.Of course, such measures don’t stop the addresses already floating around spammers’ lists. Nor does it stop the other methods by which addresses are harvested. But it does ameliorate the problem, which is almost as awesome as me using the word ameliorate in a blog post. So give it a shot with the addresses posted on your site.

Tip: if you’re a Mac user (as you should be!) you can easily obfuscate address using this widget. If not, there’s a simple web-based tool, too.

PS - If your arm’s still in the air, you can put it down now.