20. July 2008, 18:41, by Silvan Mühlemann
Nine ways to obfuscate e-mail addresses compared
When displaying an e-mail address on a website you obviously want to obfuscate it to avoid it getting harvested by spammers. But which obfuscation method is the best one? I drove a test to find out. Here are the results:
In 2006 I opened nine different e-mail addresses. On this page I published the nine e-mail addresses. But every address has been obfuscated by a different method. I made sure it's getting indexed by Google by putting a link to that page on the tilllate.com homepage.
Then I waited 1.5 years (see the original post).
For each e-mail address I counted the amount of spam I received. The amount of spam received started by 21MB (for no obfuscation and a total of over 1800 spam mails) and went down to absolutely no spam.
