Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by marginalia_nu 962 days ago
If you aren't getting spam-email on your obfuscated email string, it seems more likely email scraping with the intent of sending spam is very risky given the fairly widespread proliferation of spamtraps/honeypots along with actual legislation in some regions. You can quickly ruin your IP and domain reputation and end up on various grey/blacklists doing this stuff. Like I post my (unobfuscated) email address absolutely everywhere and rarely get unsolicited email as a result, because almost nobody in this space is ignorant enough to send unsolicited commercial emails to unknown email addresses found online.

It also seems like this type of obfusction probably never was particularlly effective. Like you can write a write dumb if-else style matcher to de-obfuscate most of these schemes fairly trivially.

2 comments

> It also seems like this type of obfusction probably never was particularlly effective.

It actually is effective - at least it was a few years ago. See these tests:

https://www.johnplummer.com/javascript/email-obfuscation-wor...

https://web.archive.org/web/20160304042853/http://techblog.t...

> Like I post my (unobfuscated) email address absolutely everywhere and rarely get unsolicited email as a result, because almost nobody in this space is ignorant enough to send unsolicited commercial emails to unknown email addresses found online.

Really? I’ve started getting founderspam from YC companies lately, and when I read this blog post I realized where they likely got my email address.