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Thursday, November 17, 2005
Obfuscation
Mid-morning yesterday I was informed by my rather unhelpful web host that the 'contact us' form on one of the hotel websites I'd made had been used for spam, so they'd disabled it. Great - that meant the hotel would lose bookings during their busiest time of the year until I got home after work to fix it.
So I spent a couple of hours fixing it when I got home after work, and in the process learnt something new: obfuscation. In the fight against spam, the only surefire way of not receiving it is to not have an email address. This is a bit limiting though, so the next best thing is to never let anyone know your email address. Again, this is rather restrictive. If you have a website that you use for promoting a business, you really need to show your email address on it... and if you do, nasty little spambots pick it up and that's the beginning of the end for your inbox.
There are several relatively technical ways round this which I don't understand, but the simplest is email obfuscation. You basically translate your email address into weird code that doesn't look like an email address at all, so spambots don't recognise it and therefore ignore it. Brilliant!
The annoying thing with it though is the word: I woke up at 5am this morning with it going round and round in my head like a catchy little tune: obfuscation, obfuscation, obfuscation...
.....posted at 8:55 am permalink
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