what (at) is (dot) this.

December 20, 2010 10:02 AM

I have a question about e-mail addresses.

I am about to change my e-mail address.

I've seen addresses put out on websites as

mk (at) yahoo (dot) com.

I assume this is done to cut back on spammers, etc. Can anyone give me more in-depth info as to why this is done and when/where to do it?

posted by goalyeehah to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

It may prevent unsophisticated attempts to collect email addresses automatically using a simple template that looks for strings of characters like "[e-mail]". If you are posting your email address on a page you can edit, another popular method is to post the address as an image instead of typed text.
posted by Nomyte at 10:07 AM on December 20, 2010

Realistically, if you're on GMail, for instance, the spam blocking is so sophisticated that it just doesn't matter if people grab your email address anymore, but this was originally intended to, as noted, hide the address from bots that would look for the [e-mail] pattern and add it to a list.
posted by disillusioned at 10:35 AM on December 20, 2010

It's often called "munging."
posted by Avenger50 at 10:36 AM on December 20, 2010

I've also seen people do something like:

"My email address is XXXXXXXXX@YYYY+COM (but change the + to a .)"
posted by darkgroove at 12:41 PM on December 20, 2010

this was originally intended to, as noted, hide the address from bots that would look for the [e-mail] pattern and add it to a list.

...and anyone still doing it presumably believes that no spammer has ever noticed it's a fairly common convention and simply added another pattern for "something(at)whatever(dot)com|org|etc"

Depending where your mail is hosted(cf. GMail note above), spam blocking has gotten pretty good. Don't waste your time with pointless tricks like this and just be careful where you stick your e-mail address in the first place.
posted by Su at 2:05 PM on December 20, 2010

There is another way also...
Provide your correct address to a certain website (it escapes me at the moment), and the addy gets munged into a string of HTML & hex values to obfuscate it.
posted by Drasher at 5:58 PM on December 20, 2010