concealing email addresses

[Neil Fernandez]

In message <200304190716.DAA18871 at fry.research.att.com>, N. J. A. Sloane
<njas at research.att.com> writes

[various snips]

>METHOD 1
>The best suggestion (in my opinion) came from Gordon Royle. 
>
>He suggested making two gifs,
>one for "dot" and one for "at",
>and replacing (say)
>
>        gordon at csse.uwa.edu.au
>
>with
>
>gordon<img src="at.gif" alt="_AT_">csse<img src="dot.gif" alt="_DOT_">uwa<img 
>src="dot.gif"
> alt="_DOT_">edu<img src="dot.gif" alt="_DOT_">au

>So the %A lines (and anywhere else an email address appears) would
>look like 
>
>%A A012345 Gordon Royle (gordon<img src="at.gif" alt="_AT_">csse<img 
>src="dot.gif" alt="_DOT_">uwa<img src="dot.gif" alt="_DOT_">edu<img 
>src="dot.gif" alt="_DOT_">au), Jan 01, 2000

>METHOD 2

>gordon_AT_csse_DOT_uwa_DOT_edu_DOT_au

>METHOD 3

>gordon at csse dot uwa dot edu dot au

I think Method 1 is an excellent idea. I suspect some spammers may
already be wise to Method 3 and probably to Method 2.

If I might suggest a small tweak - how about giving the 'at' and 'dot'
images non-obvious names, to try to stay a step ahead of the spammers
for longer? They could be called anything. If the alt tags were also
changed they'd have to stay comprehensible to humans, no brilliant
suggestion comes to mind though.

Neil

-- 
Neil Fernandez