Barry wrote: > Do you want to attempt to obscure the > address (e.g. "barry--at--python--dot--org")
Chuq wrote: > Anything you programmatically obscure will be programmatically > de-obscured. I don't think this is entirely true. This is probably true if you invent ways of rearranging text that is still readable as an e-mail address, but one possible good solution is to use an image instead. If you generate an image containing the entire e-mail address, it can be made extremely hard to read, even with state-of-the-art OCR. And it raises the bar so high that it will be a long time before spammers bother to even try OCR -- it's much too easy to harvest addresses in other, simpler ways. Just to give you an idea of what tricks are possible: a GIF can contain many different colour table entries that map to almost the same colour; the background can be patterned; the text can be distorted or blurred; the text can be drawn shadowed or embossed; the text can be broken into multiple frames of a GIF animation; etc. etc. Many of these things can be done subtly enough that the text is still trivial for anyone to read, yet it becomes phenomenally difficult for a machine to decode -- to the point where the spammer's best bet is to take a video capture of the screen, print it out, run it through a scanner, and run a fancy OCR program on the result. -- ?!ng _______________________________________________ Mailman-Developers mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.python.org/mailman-21/listinfo/mailman-developers
