h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: Email Addresses in ASCII Code - A2032589
Author: oh, so your a goth? Ostro- or Visi? - U170182

I hope this is up to scratch, and helpfull. I did a spell check on it, but I'm dyslexic, so if anyone spots a mistake say and I'll fix it.

This looks interesting, osyag!

It needs experimenting with to see if it works, and perhaps I'll do that whan I get back from work.

nice
i've been obfuscating my email address for a while now
from my h2g2 user page

<link href="mailto:&#104;&#97;p&#112;&#121;&#64;&#115;d&#102;.&#108;&#111;&#110;&#101;&#115;&#116;ar&#46;&#111;r&#103;">&#104;&#97;&#112;&#112;&#121;&#64;&#115;&#100;&#102;&#46;&#108;&#111;n&#101;&#115;&#116;&#97;&#114;&#46;&#111;&#114;&#103;

Is this different to what's being described in this entry, HappyDude?

it's an example of what's talked about in the article.

in my e-mail address the first 'code' is #104 for "h" just like the article sez it should be


I would like to see the examples expanded with both a GuideML & an XHTML example of an obfuscated mailto

Can this sort of disguised e-mail address be used as a link? If an e-mail address is included in a web page, it should always be a link that can be clicked to bring you directly to the mail program, otherwise people won't bother.

yes, that is why I asked for code examples to be included in the article in my last post
http://alicorna.com/cgi/obfuscator.cgi

Is this still being worked on?

None of my pages, other than my intro, have been updated in a while, as My life went a bit crappy just before xmas, but I've got a few other bits to add, like underscores and hyphens, and also a warning not to put your email address in plain text for the link. Then it should, hopefully, be finished, unless anyone can think of anything else to add.

hope you'll get ahead soon

Just one point: the w3c consortium or whoever it is that is in charge of web/email convention has a clear point about sample email addresses. The rationale is that some day someone might register a 'home.com' address and then will have to collect all the spam that was meant to go to your sample address Therefore, please don't think up random strings to use them as examples but stick to the official 'dummy' addresses.

Here's what you can safely use because these won't ever be valid:
example.org
example.net
example.com
*.invalid
*.test
*.example

BTW, this is much like the 555-... telephone numbers that they use in American movies. You can dial them all, one after the other, and can be sure that nobody will be annoyed.


Bossel

Thanks, I'll change it

Is it not enough to use an entity-number for the "at" sign (@) in your address? This is what bots are set to trawl for, surely.

This encryption method relies I gather on the fact that the entity numbers are unique to GuideML and bots are not programmed to read that . . . but presumably they could be?

Is it not safer after all to use "me at example dot org" or whatever?

No, entities are real HTML not just GuideML. I had suspected from the date evidence that people started using the technique on this site at the time of the BBC move in order to confuse/bypass the moderators. It is possible some of them would have done it anyway of course.

i've been using for a while on my user page ... to confuse spambots

Is this still being worked on?

-NEWS UPDATE-

I'm still working on this, but like a lot of stuff I'm doing at the moment it is on hold while I'm trying to get my job sorted out.

Can you give us a timescale?

I could probably get round to it in a week or so. Somewhere around then anyway.

Er...it's been about six weeks...

...and it looks like the only thing left to be done is changing the dummy email address...

Are you going to finish this T.B.?