Lately, across our network of sites, we've been getting more spam than usual. The cause of the problem, the spambots are getting better. Spambots are programmatic robots that crawl the internet (in much the same way the search engines do) with the sole purpose of gathering e-mail addresses in order to send you completely irrelevant promotional material. I've often wondered; it would be really easy to determine the context of the e-mail address you find and you could even glean information from multiple sources as to the consumer preferences of your subject, and increase what must be a dismal conversion rate for the spammers. Anyway, that's not what this article is about, this article is about e-mail obfuscation, or making the e-mail addresses on your site readable by humans but unintelligible to robots.
read more...