Hi all,

So we have all seen examples on the internet where people write emails as email[at]domain.tld, but I am wondering if this is actually useful. Its obviously better to find a different way then [at] to write it because that is so overused, but if I was designing a crawler I would rather have it look for <a href="mailto:address"> then to care about what they are writing on the page.

So my question is, is it really worth spending time doing this to emails or does it really have no effect at all but just makes people feel more secure?

Thanks all,
Truly

I don't think email harvesters actually check the page the email is on, since they harvest so many addresses. I'm not sure what you're asking. Are you asking if covering your email like <a href="mailto:example@example.com> helps? It probably does, but some harvesters might tell their bots to look for keywords, like: [at] [dot] (at) (dot). I personally would put my email in an image. You might want to check out these sites.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_munging
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_address_harvesting
http://hidden-email.com/
http://emailcover.com
http://www.mytrashmail.com/anti_spam.aspx