Talk:Address munging

message: Since there's ongoing editing I won't change the page myself to avoid conflicts,
* No, go ahead. I'm finished for a while. Motor 16:28, 20 Mar 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: [Untitled]

message: There's something I've been wondering about for some time, and since I can't find the answer in the article I'll ask here. Do spambots only look for addresses in what is printed on the webpage, or does it also look at the code itself? ie. would it be possible do to something like this: <A HREF="mailto: person@example.com">person(at)example(.)com</A>, or would the mailto bit have to be mungled as well? Desdenova 15:25, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Plain text vs. tags 

message: There are HTML codes for substitute the @ and . (dot) symbol with HTML code, this might prevent bots from finding it, while still being fully readable as an usual address to a human.
—
No, this is a misunderstanding of the idea, and is no better at preventing harvesting than the simplest forms of address munging.
What the citation on the main page suggests is randomly substituting characters with their corresponding entities. In other words, do not simply substitute the @ and the . but rather pick random characters from the address (potentially including the @ and .) and substitute them instead.
Nevertheless all good things must come to an end, because if this becomes popular harvesters will be programmed to look for it — an email address munged as such won't look like a valid email address to the eye *before* rendering the page, but I can't imagine it taking a lot of code to simply substitute all entities with their corresponding characters. 
BrianRecchia (talk) 04:29, 18 April 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  HTML codes 

message: It might be worth mentioning the use of javascript to display email addresses and usable mailto: links.  The hope is that spambots won't be clever enough to parse the javascript.  I can't attest to the effectiveness of this technique, hopefully someone else can chime in with an opinion.  An implementation of this technique is available under the section "JavaScript to obscure email addresses."
* I don't understand how this works. Why don't bots just run the JavaScript? Seems pretty easy to defeat. I suppose it would take some lead time between this technique coming into common use and spammers adding the functionality to their bots. Just like adding OCR to defeat imaged emails. --Daev 15:30, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Javascript 

message: I got my information from several places, but this was the most explicit. I'm not sure it's in the right place though. There is a section on email address that talks about it (linked in this article), but it's pretty bare (so I added a bit). I think I will fill in some information there, but perhaps we could have a new article? One on spam prevention techniques. --Daev 15:21, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Plussed Addressing 

message: There's something I'd like to add to the article regarding the problems of address disguising, but I'd rather wait for others' opinions, it could be considered original research or whatever although I consider this commonplace enough to mention without sources:
In my experience, for people that can read/write English but aren't native English speakers, dot and specially at aren't immediately obvious as being . and @, people reads addresses in their language (e.g. in my native languages: in spanish <user arroba server punto tld> or in catalan <user arrova server punt tld>) (and @ is something not usually learned when learning English...).
Comments?
--Outlyer 15:40, 2 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  ''At'', ''dot'' and foreign languages 

message: Quote from the article; According to a 2003 study by the Center for Democracy and Technology, even the simplest "transparent name mangling" of e-mail addresses can be effective. How relevant is this in 2013? A lot has changed in spam harvesters in 10 years I imagine. How smart are those bots nowadays? 84.105.172.5 (talk) 19:39, 6 May 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Outdated research? 

message: As suggested by Versageek, I am proposing here that the following be added as an external link to the page:
*Free address munging mailto html encoder
It is directly related to this page and provides a free service.
--Oguz0909  19:20, 27 May 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proposing addition of an External Link 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified  on Address munging. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20060424083903/http://www.ftc.gov:80/bcp/conline/pubs/alerts/spamalrt.htm to http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/alerts/spamalrt.htm
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20070927091755/http://bithack.se/pub/ to http://bithack.se/pub/
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20061218222622/http://www.cdt.org/speech/spam/030319spamreport.shtml to http://www.cdt.org/speech/spam/030319spamreport.shtml
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thread_title:  External links modified