Use of Email Address on the forum

[HotRoderX]

I noticed quite a few people have been posting there email address on the forum using the following format myemail@mail.com which is dangerous. Spammers use spiders or web crawlers to harvest email address on forums. Best way to post your email address on a forum is "myemail at mail dot com" .... When a spammer uses these tools they use a set of rules that look for @ and .com by using words u can confuse most these crawlers this is mainly just a friendly heads up.

[Toyman]

And the same regular expression evaluator that they use to look for the email address can by used to look for the same pattern you propose - so no, it's not the best way, and for a good spam spider, it's not even a good way, and to the spider, there's no difference.

To match a regular email address like me@mail.com:
\b[A-Z0-9._%-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}\b

To match an email address like you showed: me at mail dot com:
\b[A-Z0-9._%-]+.at.[A-Z0-9.-]+.dot.[A-Z]{2,4}\b

and it spits out all the matches.

[Sgt. Schultz]

And the same regular expression evaluator that they use to look for the email address can by used to look for the same pattern you propose - so no, it's not the best way, and for a good spam spider, it's not even a good way, and to the spider, there's no difference.

To match a regular email address like me@mail.com:
\b[A-Z0-9._%-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}\b

To match an email address like you showed: me at mail dot com:
\b[A-Z0-9._%-]+.at.[A-Z0-9.-]+.dot.[A-Z]{2,4}\b

and it spits out all the matches.

Which is why everyone should have disposable e-mail accounts for internet posting, website purchases etc ... you can dump it as soon as you starting getting spam and then create a new one.


.

[Pierre!]

I took a screen capture of my email address , and then use the mailto: command in the web code... and it seems to have kept me safe, but I have always wondered why the spammers couldn't catch the 'mailto:' piece and use it?

Am I safe, or fooling myself... :supergrin: