Erm...So what's all this about?
No-one likes spam. It's intrusive, annoying and more importantly, just plain rude! But how can you get rid of it? The short answer is that if your account's already compromised, then realistically, you probably can't. But fear not! If you're just starting out with a fresh email address, there's a simple step you can take to prevent the spam from ever starting to arrive. This amazing secret of a spam-free web-experience - email obfuscation.
Tell me more, tell me more!
A lot of people don't know the process by which their email addresses are compromised. Which is odd considering that they're aiding the process all the time by leaving their contact details in blog posts, forums and on their very own websites. Some clever souls even go so far as to embed their email addresses in HTML like so:
<a href="mailto:myemail@domainname.com">email me!</a>
Yes, this makes it easier for people to contact them, but did you know that this self-same snippet of HTML could be making it easier for the spammers to come a-knockin' too! Oh noes indeed!
Spambots: Transform!
"But how?" I hear you exclaim. One word: spambots. Not the latest range of Hasbro toys whittled meticulously from luncheon-meat, but clever little computer programs that trawl the web, following links from one page to the next in much the same way as an idle net-surfer. Although in this instance, their target isn't underskirt photos of Britney Spears, but *dun duh duuuuh* people's email addresses!
When a spambot reaches a new web site, it immediately scans the page its on looking either for a tell-tale "mailto:" within the HTML (since this signifies an email link), or for the characters around an "@" symbol (in the hopes that it can get lucky and extract a viable email from the text).
Luckily, most spambots are, well, pretty thick. They're hastily coded, and since they return such a vast amount of emails anyway no-one can really be bothered with improving them. That's why tricks like the form above can work for a good long while. And what does the form do? Well quiet, 'cause here comes the science bit...
The science bit.
See. We told you it was coming. Anyway, so basically, the form above takes your email address and renders it in a mix of ISO and Hex encoding. Which is to say, a special way of writing out characters in the code so that although you can't see any difference, to a spambot, all the letters are mangled and weird-looking. And d'ya know what, it just goes "pfft!"and can't even be bothered to even read them 'cause it's got much better things to be doing with its time thank you very much.
And this is fool-proof right?
Oh no no no! No, we can't offer you any guarantee that this will work forever. Who knows what might happen in years to come? Maybe if everyone starts to use this form, or others like it, then the spammers will have to improve because the amount of results being returned by the spambots will plummet dramatically. At that point, the payback to effort ratio suddenly begins to make sense. Hell, who knows, the ultimate end result of all this might mean a spammer ends up having to raise an army of people, put them in a factory somewhere in a developing country and have them cut-and-paste people's email addresses into a list by hand - it's the only surefire way to get past every CAPTCHA.
All we know is that this is working now. We've been spam-free on our main email addresses for almost a year now thanks to this. But we're not going to guarantee for how much longer. So enjoy it while you can! Tchüß!