Comments on: Why is there a %40 where the @ should be?

Why is there a %40 where the @ should be?

FidelDonson — Wed, 12 Sep 2001 12:17:11 -0800

FidelDonson's Profile
Name: Fidel Donson
Email: donson%40mail.dk

I am wondering why the @ shows up as a %40 in the user profiles

By: jpoulos

jpoulos — Wed, 12 Sep 2001 12:20:29 -0800

It's to prevent bots from picking up your email address and sending you spam.

By: mathowie

mathowie — Wed, 12 Sep 2001 13:35:18 -0800

I run some spam bot diverting mechanisms, so if anyone uses a bot to scrape emails, they should be turned away. But if they don't get turned away, there's no email addresses with an @ symbol in them. Try the link, it should still work for you.

By: fooljay

fooljay — Sat, 15 Sep 2001 13:42:44 -0800

Matt, dontcha think that parlor tricks like these are well known by the spammers? It's their "business" to know these things. You know?

By: skallas

skallas — Mon, 17 Sep 2001 23:28:02 -0800

Small suggestion:

Ideally you would want to add a random word to the address. Something like this:

Address is spam protected, please remove RANDOM_WORD

Email: user@RANDOM_WORD.mail.com

or

Email: userRANDOM_WORD@mail.com

etc.

By: Lionfire

Lionfire — Wed, 10 Oct 2001 01:15:41 -0800

user@RANDOM_WORD.mail.com is definitely not a good idea. Most of the spam robots are smart enough to realise that host.domain.com doesn't exist. In fact, from what I've been told, most of the software will actually try domain.com in this case.

While I don't really care (my procmail scripts take care of 90% of the spam I get), my favourite email cloaking technique is just to replace the @ with something else. Perhaps a small png/gif that looks like an @, so that no real users are confused, but spam robots won't see it as an email address.

While that means you can't have a mailto: link, and you can't fully cut'n'paste the email address, it seems to be the most fool(robot) proof technique.