Disguising addresses makes it more difficult for people to send e-mail to each other and is, at best, a workaround for the problem of spam. When posting to usenet it should also be noted that disguising an e-mail address is, in the strictest terms, a violation of RFC 1036. This RFC describes the format of usenet messages and requires a valid e-mail address in the From: field of the post. In practise, few people follow this so strictly.
Some people (especially Internet and Usenet oldtimers who were around prior to the commercialization ...
When an undisguised e-mail address (e.g. "no-one@example.com") is posted in public it is easily recognised and collected by computer software. A collected address will then become a target for unsolicited bulk e-mail. Address munging can be used to prevent the use of software recognition for large-scale harvesting of addresses, while giving enough clues for a human reader to easily reconstruct t ...
As an alternative to address munging, several "transparent" techniques allow people to post a valid e-mail address that really will reach them (and not accidentally get sent to anyone else), but make it difficult for spam to get through. These techniques include
Use "transparent name mangling" by replacing characters in the address by equivalent HTML references from the list of XML and HTML character entity references. (When a real person copies-and-pastes that e-mail address, or clicks on the "mailto:", it works fine).
A common method of disguising an address is to replace the "@" symbol with the word "at", and any "." with "(dot)" giving a result that does not look like an e-mail address at all:
no-one at example (dot) com
There are many other methods for disguising the address:
Some of these methods still result in a recognisable e-mail address, but an incorrect one. This is less satisfactory as anything resembling an e-mail address will be collected and used for spam. The following points are important when using addres ...
