💾 Archived View for station.martinrue.com › smokey › a2d0a4e263954ab68ecea8a4a51225aa captured on 2023-09-28 at 17:46:24. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-09-08)
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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?
2 years 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. · 2 years ago
I was always of the same mindset as eph here, figured it was an anti-bot skimming little trick · 2 years 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. · 2 years 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. · 2 years ago