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Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Elegant Email Spam Deterrent

Have you ever found yourself doing something like this on one of your webpages/blogs/etc...

"Contact me at your [dot] name [at] domain [dot] com", instead of "Contact me at your.name@domain.com"

...because clearly the latter (on a publicly accessible page) would have your inbox (or hopefully spam folder) crammed with junk in short order?

Try this:

<div style="float:left">
Contact me at</div>
<div style="text-align:left;direction:rtl; unicode-bidi:bidi-override">moc.niamod@eman.ruoy
</div>



It will display in a web browser as "your.name@domain.com", but... try copying the displayed text and pasting it into Notepad/Wordpad/etc. It pastes backwards, and is useless - particularly to robots that try to rip your email address from the document source. (Just don't make it a link!)

This method is of course still exploitable, bit it will avoid your email address from being picked up by poorly written code, of which 99.9% of malicious code is. Additionally, it is as safe as (or more safe than) "your [dot] name [at] domain [dot ] com".

Done!
 
 
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