Paul Waring wrote:
Mehmet Tolga Avcioglu wrote:
Isn't it also strange that everybody assumes "name at domain dot com" is so much harder to parse than "name@domain.com" by the spam bots. The image solution is better but as you said won't work unless it is a universal effort which is not achievable.
"name at domain dot com" probably isn't harder to parse, but I suspect at the moment most spam harvesters can't be bothered to implement that functionality when there's more than enough unprotected email addresses on the web for them to use already. I suspect though that if everyone suddenly changed to the other format then the spammers would pick up on this pretty quickly.
Image solutions don't work even if they're universally applied, it's not exactly difficult to download an image and extract the text from it - unless you obscure the text of course but then that makes it difficult for ordinary people to read and impossible for anyone with a visual disability.
With other words this just means that you can try anything, and perhaps it has some effect on short notice. But the 'bad minded' always come up with another way around the solution you just came up with.
The same holds for spam filters, they just become more and more advanced but the spammers just find new ways around them.
This is the vicious circle with spam, and IMHO it cannot be broken.