電子郵件地址混淆真的能防止垃圾郵件嗎？

今天的問答環節是由SuperUser提供的，SuperUser是Stack Exchange的一個分支，它是一個由Q&a網站組成的社群驅動分組。...

Many people obfuscate their email addresses–typing out someguy (at) somedomain (dot) com, for example–to project themselves from SPAM bots. Do such obfuscation techniques actually work?

今天的問答環節是由SuperUser提供的，SuperUser是Stack Exchange的一個分支，它是一個由Q&a網站組成的社群驅動分組。

問題

超級使用者讀者Kyle Cronin想知道這樣的郵件混淆技術是否值得這麼麻煩：

Most of the time when I see someone post their email address online, especially if it’s a personal address, they use something like

me [at] example [dot] com

instead of the actual email address ([email protected]). Even top members of this community use similar styles in their profiles:

jt.superuser[AT]gmail[DOT]com

quixote dot su over yonder near that gmail place

The typical rationale is that this kind of obfuscation prevents the email address from being automatically recognized and harvested by spammers. In an age where spammers can beat all but the most diabolical captchas, is this really true? And given how effective modern spam filters are, does it really matter if your email address is harvested?

考慮到這對你試圖與之交流的實際人類來說是一個麻煩（而對於你試圖避免的收割機機器人來說可能沒有太多麻煩），值得深入挖掘，以找出這些技術是否真的有效。

答案

超級使用者貢獻者Akira提供了一項關於這個問題的研究，以支援使用模糊處理：

Some time ago I stumbled upon the post of someone who created a honeypot and waited for differently obsfucated email-addresses coming back:

Nine ways to obfuscate e-mail addresses compare

CSS Codedirection 0 MB

<span style="unicode-bidi:bidi-override; direction: rtl;"> moc.elpmaxe@zyx </span>

CSS display:none 0 MB

xyz<span style="display:none">foo</span>@example.com

ROT13 Encryption 0 MB

[email protected]

Using ATs and DOTs 0.084 MB

xyz AT example DOT com

Building with Javascript 0.144 MB

var m = 'xyz'; // you can use any clever method of m += '@'; // creating the string containing the email m += 'example.com'; // and then add it to the DOM (eg, via $('.email).append(m); // jquery)

Replacing ‘@’ and ‘.’ with Entities 1.6 MB

xyz@example.com

Splitting E-Mail with comments 7.1 MB

xyz@examplecom

Urlencode 7.9 MB

xyz%40example.com

Plain Text 21 MB

[email protected]

This is the original statistical graph made by Silvan Mühlemann, all credit goes towards him:

So, to answer the question: Yes, (in a way) email obsfucation works.

投稿人ak86對此很重視，他指出，無論你透過混淆獲得什麼，你都會因為給自己和同事帶來不便而失去：

There was an interesting article by Cory Doctorow recently on this subject here which argued that email obfuscation doesn’t serve much purpose, and a more optimal approach is intelligently managing the spam you get. TL;DR version:

The objective of this entire exercise is not to reduce the amount of spam you get in your email, but the amount of spam you manually have to remove from your inbox.
Email obfuscation is a c***tant battle to come up with ever sophisticated bot-proof, human-readable encoding, and is a drain on the productivity of both the creator, and the correspondent.
“Almost any email address that you use for any length of time eventually becomes widely enough known that you should assume all the spammers have it.”
“The convenience of stable, easily copy-pastable email addresses” wins over trying to hide from the spambots.

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