Does posting emails with [at] really do anything?

[Dario D.]

I'm doing an experiment on whether or not posting emails with [at] really does stop bots from picking them up or not, and am looking for volunteers who can help post this around.

All you have to do is post the following 2 lines on your website/blog/forum-posts in some invisible way (such as with the the same color font as the background) and we'll see if either email address starts getting spammed.

gmx [at] bot_theory.com reverse
(this is testing the theory that if emails are indeed picked up by bots, they would *easily* be able to convert [at] to @, and reverse the user/domain if the word "reverse", "flip", etc is anywhere nearby)

[email protected]
(this one is testing to see if bots pick up email addresses AT ALL, just with a regular address)

Please mention what sites/blogs you're posting at (I guess forum threads need not apply), and you'll probably get some extra visits from the people here as well...

 

[Dario D.]

*bump* - Still no spam, btw.

 

[yilduz]

I'd be willing to help with your experiment.

 

[andr69]

The effectiveness of posting emails with [at] depends on your purpose, however. But in my practice it hardly brought me some perfect results

 

[DomainMOD]

Although I applaud you trying to test this, the easy answer is no, using [at] instead of @ is not going to protect you from spam bots harvesting your email address. And even if it did work today (which it doesn't), how do you know the harvesting software wouldn't be tweaked tomorrow to include the [at] symbol, making all of your publicly posted [at] addresses just as vulnerable as your @ ones.

Plus, given the number of variables at play, months and months of testing would most likely come back with inconclusive results.

 

[Dario D.]

Right, I didn't think [at] would work... The purpose of the test was originally to prove that it did nothing. However, seeing as no spam has been sent to either address still, I'm wondering if maybe all the harvesters have been thrown in jail by now. (I know the FBI works on this stuff overseas... possibly with very good result)

 

[rcep]

IMO its the same i already tried getting rid of bots this way dono it didnt help me much still got spam
although in one of my domains i tried to create an image of the email name like the verification code that prevents spam , since 1.5 years no "SPAM" attacking me daily