💾 Archived View for station.martinrue.com › smokey › a2d0a4e263954ab68ecea8a4a51225aa captured on 2022-07-16 at 18:41:55. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Is there a security reason people will write their email as some variation of example AT emailservice.com instead of example@emailservice.com? Is this just a preference or is it something like protection against email botcrawlers?
4 months ago
Definitely meant to be protection against spambots picking up the address, but I'm not sure how effective it is these days. IIRC, people have been using this trick for (almost?) decades now, so I'd be surprised if it's effective against any of the more "serious" bots. · 4 months ago
I was always of the same mindset as eph here, figured it was an anti-bot skimming little trick · 4 months ago
I had assumed it was to keep bots from scraping emails for spamlists from the Web, but I think it provides another small way for self expression to appear. · 4 months ago
It's honeslty mostly security thetre, as the pattern is mostly standardised, with a simple regex being enough to cover most of them, but it does defend against bots that don't implement this regex. · 4 months ago