[Coco] [Color Computer] What the hell is this ==> rjrttyat aoldot com

[Roger Taylor]

At 02:10 PM 5/12/2006, you wrote:
>That trick would prevent the email plain in the source code of the page.
>
>I wonder if some spammers actually render the page before scraping
>addresses. That would defeat this trick, I guess.


We all know that "name at server dot com" means "name at server.com", so I can 
almost guarantee that these simple tricks aren't fooling spammers or their 
harvesting software.

In fact, people have used spelling like "doht kom", "dot kom", "doht kohm", 
and all sorts of variations and those, too, aren't hard to figure out.

And... if you want to see people really trying to be smooth, but really 
aren't, look at the pay dating sites and how they are trying to cheat the 
sites by giving away their e-mail or screennames in their write-ups to 
potential dates.  Phrases like "you can reach me at the big y and I'm 
hot2handle" (hot2handle at yahoo.com), or "I'm purtywoman on the A" 
(purtywoman at aol.com).

So you see, with a little parsing or pattern matching a program can be 
trained to defeat the latest tricks.

-- 
Roger Taylor