Subject:
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Improved email obfuscation
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.admin.suggestions
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Date:
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Mon, 16 Jul 2007 01:07:45 GMT
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Viewed:
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3694 times
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I have a suggestion regarding the spam-prevention obfuscation that is applied to
email addresses in http://news.lugnet.com message headers. I think the dummy
phrases should not appear at the beginning or end of the address, only
interposed between characters of the address.
I make this suggestion because when I search for my email address with Google,
the only results whatsoever are on Lugnet news posts. When the dummy text
appears at the end of an address, the address itself appears intact and
perfectly valid. Furthermore, the dummy text is often demarcated by punctuation
characters that rarely appear in email addresses, even if perhaps technically
legal.
As a result, no special effort would be needed for an email harvesting crawler
to recognize these cases. Indeed, my actual email address can be extracted from
those pages Google turns up with the sample regular expression described at
http://www.regular-expressions.info/email.html, a popular reference. For
example:
#!/usr/bin/perl
$text = 'From: John Doe <john@doe.com#IHateSpam#> blah blah blah';
if ($text =~ m/\b([A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4})\b/i) {
print "Found address: $1\n";
}
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Running this script, which uses the generic regular expression, reports the
following:
Found address: john@doe.com
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In other words, that particular obfuscation technique does not fool even the
simplest search strategy. Consider the following cases:
- <^SayNoToSpam^john@doe.com>
- <john@doe.com#IHateSpam#>
- <john@doe.SPAMLESScom>
Only the third case will not yield John Doe’s correct email address to the
example script. What I suggest is retaining the last sort of obfuscation method
and abandoning the “prefix” and “suffix” methods. I have no evidence to offer
that this would constitute a real improvement other than the conclusion that the
“obvious” obfuscation methods I’ve identified don’t seem like they would be very
effective.
Thank you for your consideration, and thank you for Lugnet.
Jim
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