An annoying practice from another age
When you want to contact academic researchers, particularly computer scientists, you often find their email addresses on their Web pages in a mildly obfuscated form such as “albert dot einstein at princeton dot edu”.
If you try to copy-paste such a pseudo-address into an email client so as to fix it there, you often have to spend some time fighting the email client’s knowledge of what an email address looks like. It can result in errors and bounced mail. Not the world’s worst scandal but an annoying waste of time.
An address written out in that form is a way for the page owner to announce to the cognoscenti: “I am a computer scientist and hence very knowledgeable about the ways of the Internet; I know that spammers run bots to harvest addresses. See how I defeat them.”
So 1995!
Both spam and defenses against it are no longer what they were back then. Anyone who manages to use email effectively is protected, even without knowing it, by spam blockers, which have become quite good. (According to a specialized site, 14.5 billion spam emails are sent every day, so without these protections we would all be be drowning in spam, which for most people is not the case.)
As to any spam harvesters who are really interested in computer science researchers, they are most likely able anyway to write a little regular expression analyzer that captures the vast majority of the supposedly obfuscated addresses.
If you really want strangers to be able to email you without making your address visible to the spammers, and are a CS person, just include in your Web page a few lines of Javascript that, without revealing the email address in the HTML code, will display something like “Here is my email address”, in such a way that a visitor who clicks on Here gets a new-email window with your email address pre-filled. Not very hard — I use this trick on my own home page and am certainly not a Javascript expert.
But I suspect that as long as you are prepared to let people email you, even just letting your email address appear in clear is not going to result in catastrophe. Your organization’s or ISP’s spam filter is protecting you.
Come on. This is 2020. Windows 95 and the OJ Simpson trial are no longer the news of the day. Time to stop worrying about what no longer matters, and stop bothering people who are just trying to reach you.
Down with corny address obfuscation!
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