[ILUG] [TOTD] Your e-mail as a small PNG

[Alan Horkan]

On Wed, 8 Sep 2004, Rick Moen wrote:

> Date: Wed, 8 Sep 2004 08:29:24 -0700
> From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
> To: ilug at linux.ie
> Subject: Re: [ILUG] [TOTD] Your e-mail as a small PNG
>
> Quoting Barry O'Donovan (ilug at barryodonovan.com):
>
> > Well my editor over at the Linux Gazette uses a neat little utility
> > called text2gif (from libungif-progs) and ImageMagick to produce small
> > (<300 bytes) images of an e-mail addresses (see
> > http://linuxgazette.net/authors/odonovan.html for an example).
>
> I actually would have preferred that Ben Okopnik (editor) have _omitted_
> that obfuscation technique from http://linuxgazette.net/authors/moen.html ,
> at least, because I don't believe in hiding from spammers -- and so told
> him, but didn't insist on being a unique exception to his policy, which
> would have been prima-donna-ish, indeed.
>
> My own policy (and that of many friends such as Don Marti[1]) is
> reflected in places like:
>
> http://lists.svlug.org/lists/listinfo/svlug
> http://linuxmafia.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/conspire
>
> [1] http://lists.svlug.org/archives/web-team/2004-September/001895.html:
>
> "It is SVLUG policy never to obscure any email address
> to hide from spammers.  When you let the abusers of
> a medium shape your use of the medium, you lose.


A different trick to to try and make it a little less easy for spambots
but more importantly without annoying real people by munging hte addresses
is to use escape characters such as:

&#64; instead of 'at'

or any of the real unicode escape values for the letters you want to use.


Sincerely

Alan Horkan

Inkscape, Draw Freely http://inkscape.org