[LINK] Email Obfuscation Helps Spammers: Google returns 27 million results for "* at * dot com"

[Kim Holburn]

On 2007/Jun/17, at 7:44 AM, Ivan Trundle wrote:
> On 17/06/2007, at 2:23 PM, Kim Holburn wrote:
>> http://typewriting.org/2006/06/19/Email_Obfuscation_Helps_Spammers/
>>
>>> Email Obfuscation Helps Spammers
>>>
>>> Some people think email obfuscation is a good way to fight spam,  
>>> <snip>
>
>>> Google returns 27 million results for "* at * dot com". That's 27  
>>> million email addresses waiting to be spammed. Google doesn’t  
>>> allow you to search for the "@" sign, so that’s 27 million email  
>>> addresses that wouldn’t be available on Google if they were not  
>>> obfuscated.
>
> <snip>
>
> All this tells me is that using "at * dot com" is not a good way to  
> hide an address, that's all. I agree in principle that if you want  
> to hide an e-mail address, you don't put it on a public website.  
> But for the countless millions who want to publicise their e-mail  
> address, but NOT to spammers, there are other ways. It just depends  
> on how inventive you want to be.

Yeah, I agree in this case diversity and invention is the way to go  
it's just that millions of people have thought: "I'll hide my address  
like this" and bingo made the situation worse.  I think a similar  
automated solution is built in to google pages and hypermail/ 
pipermail archives isn't it?

It sticks in my mind for some reason that when email obfuscating  
first started some guy used to obfuscate his address like this:  
fredpants at pantssmith.com (remove pants to send email).  It's amazing  
that this is still not a bad method.


A quick search and scrape script would get you most of the TLDs.

Adjust the search string like this: "*at*dot*com"

and you get a lot more (79,000,000), ones like:
fredsmith/at\fredsmith/dot\com

The string : "*at*gov*dot*au" gets about 36500 hits.

The string "at*dot*au" gets 19,400,000 hits.

> After searching too many Australian government websites recently to  
> find a particular person's e-mail address, I came to the conclusion  
> that most government departments are actively pursuing the former  
> path, not the latter. Mind you, with people transferring jobs  
> every  time you blink (in and out of government), it hardly matters.
>
> iT

--
Kim Holburn
IT Network & Security Consultant
Ph: +39 06 855 4294  M: +39 3494957443
mailto:kim at holburn.net  aim://kimholburn
skype://kholburn - PGP Public Key on request

Democracy imposed from without is the severest form of tyranny.
                           -- Lloyd Biggle, Jr. Analog, Apr 1961