Re: [tlug] Munging Email Addresses

[Jim <jep200404@example.com>]

On Sat, 17 Dec 2005 11:27:09 +0900 Josh Glover <jmglov@example.com> wrote:

> I think that anything that looks like an email address should be munged.

Yup. 

How should it be munged? 

I'd like something that: 

1. the automated spam farmers would not get anything useful from

2. and that people reading the web page would have no problem with. 

Colug had a similar situation with a membership/consultants list. 
The solution was images and links, 
similar to the way that the TLUG list password show is shown as an image, 
the email address were shown as images. 
All the links pointed to something like mail:billg@example.com 
The image showed the actual email address, 
OCR is too much for automated spam farmers, 
so the images would effectively thwart the spam farmers. 
The image addresses were something like 
http://colug.net/imagefoo.php?foo=lw98723ksdfjsflj
where the value was the base64 encoding of the actual 
email address. "Security" through obscurity. Spam farmers 
could automate the collection of addresses by decoding the 
image URLs, but such is too obscure for them to bother with. 

The PHP that showed the page would replace email addresses 
with the link stuff and trick base-64 URL for the image. 
imagefoo.php decoded the foo variable and generated an image 
for it. 

It was all automated. 

What you would have to add, is code to recognize email addresses 
(so that they could be replaced).