I’ve recently made a change in the way company email addresses are displayed on CanDevs. Where listed, the @ character of a company’s email address has been removed and replaced with an image of the character instead. This is to help prevent email address harvesting. Email address harvesting is basically the process of obtaining lists of email addresses primarily for the purpose of spam. There are various methods to do this, with the use of harvesting bots (spam bots) being one of them. Harvesting bots are special software programs that crawl web pages looking for email addresses to obtain.
I was initially listing company addresses in plain text, then moved on to replacing certain characters with ASCII characters. I know that using ASCII characters to hide addresses is now an obsolete method, but I wasn’t really concerned about harvesting bots at the beginning. Besides, shouldn’t it really be up to the game companies themselves to prevent spam? But then I started thinking that instead of contributing to this worldwide problem, the least I could do was help to alleviate it.
So by using an image to replace the @ character, I am hoping that it will thwart most harvesting bots. I do know however that the newer bots can even decipher images, but as far as I know these aren’t in widespread use yet. Even using Javascript (as I do with the CanDevs address) or something similar to hide the addresses is not foolproof, but at least it helps. Besides, once in a while I don’t mind getting email from someone needing my trustworthy nature in getting millions of dollars out of Africa.
Posted by Sim@CanDevs 
Posted by Sim@CanDevs 
