[Catalyst] Re: displaying email addresses

[A. Pagaltzis]

* Wade.Stuart at fallon.com <Wade.Stuart at fallon.com> [2007-06-28 16:30]:
> This is really your best bet, as a popular module or method to
> do this would most certainly already be known by those
> harvesters and have extracting code for them.

In theory. In practice, even just entity-encoded email addresses
seem to be invisible to the majority of spiders, even today. The
fact is, there is so much web with entirely unprotected mail
addresses that it doesn’t matter whether some of them are hidden.

The spammers just let their spiders run, and at the end of the
day they don’t even know or care how many veiled addresses the
crawler missed, because they get their quota of harvested
addresses filled either way. Between the choice of spidering
more pages and scanning pages more thoroughly, it doesn’t make
economic sense to pick the latter.

If you run a _really_ huge community site, eg. Facebook, and you
have very high quality addresses (which depends on whether the
address is real and active and will reach a human) on your
records, then it might be worthwhile for the scoundrel to target
you specifically, because such address lists sell at a higher
margin. Otherwise making it up in volume is a more successful
strategy.

Regards,
-- 
Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>