Spam dodging?

[DigiTan]

I'd like to resume leaving my email address up on my personal site for obvious reasons. Since it's pretty widely-known that spambots are partial to mining email addresses for annoyance purposes, I want to try a little spam proofing.

If I posted my email as a GIF or JPEG - maybe with patterns added in, do I stand a decent chance of avoiding the bots? I figure I'd ask because it seems like a good idea, yet I see few people doing it. Any input?

[Weregoose]

I'd say a minority of the spambots look at anything more than the HTML source, so an image may do you very well.

[IAmACalculator]

Or you could do something like "Digitan AT MyEmail DOT Com", and tell them to omit the "NoSpam", and change the "DOT" to "." and "AT" to "@". If you wanted to, you could stick a "NOSPAM" in there somewhere too. Or maybe even DigitanNoSpam@MyEmail.com .

[DigiTan]

Yeah. I was assuming by now that most spambots are trained to see though that stuff. Plus I've been getting a lot of questions from international non-English speakers who might be thrown off by the countermeasures.

[todlangweilig]

What about an aim.com email account? Web-based, free, 2Gb storage space, and I've gotten <10 spam messages in the ~1 year I've had it. And if it does get killed by spam, your regular email account is still safe.

[elfprince13]

use an image, but wrap it in a nice circle or something, if you REALLY want to actually put a link as well, use javascript encoding to prevent ubereasy stealing.

[DigiTan]

I guess it would make a nice first-time GIMP project. Take that, text recognition!

[Arcane Wizard]

Yeah image should be (far) more than enough. Spaces and "AT"s are easily processed, but images are rarely targetted let alone sucesfully processed. As far as I know the only malicious bots that process images specifically target registry codes, not emails.

Also, disable HTML or inline image content in your email client. It's common for images (even single pixels) to be send with a unique source url so they immedeately know your email address is valid and read when your client opens the email.

[alexrudd]

alexrudd0+deletethispart@gmail.com

The + sign is a valid operator; it will still send to my main email. However, I can filter on the TO: email address. (Also a good trick for legitimate uses, such as +uti or +college or whatever)

[DarkerLine]

I just let it come. I get about 1000 spam emails per month, but as long as they all get filtered to the Spam folder, I'm happy.

[chipmaster]

I'm with Darkerline on this one.

Also, I know first hand that bots are being made which can decrypt images. I know someone who is working on a program to do interpret CAPTCHA's and allow bots to sign up for forums and other nuisances. I realized that I had no way of preventing him, or hackers in general to come up with a work around. I guess it will be up to the internet community to come up with the next wave of verification (biometrics anyone?) because I don't see image verification lasting for more than the next couple of years.

[DigiTan]

It's mostly the 1,000's of common bots I'm dodging versus the occasional state-of-the-art one. And I'd wager the bots aren't programmed to point out the lone email in a haystack of images. Maybe some random background will be enough for now if not overkill.

[Arcane Wizard]

Overkill. Bots that interpret images target a very specific image on a specific page. Trying to decrypt every image on a site would kill whatever machine the bot is on.