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From: Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner <spc_at_conman.org>
Date: Tue Oct 23 16:01:11 2001

It was thus said that the Great John Foust once stated:
>
> At 12:22 PM 10/23/01 -0700, you wrote:
> >Is there an assumption that spam address harvesters would be incapable of
> >replacing all occurences of 'DOT' with '.' and 'AT' with '_at_' ?
>
> If I were writing an e-mail harvester, I'm sure
> I'd have quite an extensive subroutine that looked
> for known patterns of spam-avoidance, and how to
> undo them. I can't fathom why otherwise smart people
> assume that other smart but nasty people won't think
> of the same things they did, and be able to undo them.

  It's a question of return on investment. Is the added complexity of
looking for DOT and AT (possibly with spaces, returns, dashes, etc) worth
the money for what you get in return?

  It's hard enough slugging through typical HTML and making sense of it. I
could write:

        spc&#8203;_at_&#8203;conman&#8203;.&#8203.org [1]

  The spammers (or the programmers they hire) will have to understand
entities and Unicode (which browsers do) in order to clean this up, and
until enough people do this, it's not cost effective.

  -spc (Or should I have written it as spc&amp;#8203 ... ?)

[1] 8203 is the Unicode character for a zero-width space.
Received on Tue Oct 23 2001 - 16:01:11 BST