8

Many users and forum programs in attempt to make automatic e-mail address harvesting harder modify them replacing @ character with "at" and . character with "dot".

So that

[email protected]

becomes

team at example dot com

Is there any special term for this practice?

2
  • 1
    Wow. Using other people's email address in a question about munging... (Changed to example.com as per RFC 2606, hoping bots don't get into the revisions.)
    – Arjan
    Oct 13, 2009 at 13:38
  • Is this really such a problem? The original address has been on each page of this site for ages. That's specifically why I chose it - it's already here.
    – sharptooth
    Oct 14, 2009 at 12:15

4 Answers 4

14

As well as obfuscation, it is often referred to less formally as "munging".

9

Obfuscation?

Obfuscation is the concealment of intended meaning in communication, making communication confusing, intentionally ambiguous, and more difficult to interpret.

Edit: Of course, in this case we're talking about making the communication confusing for spambots, and not for humans.

2
  • Y3s 1nd33d.
    – Maxwell
    Aug 11, 2009 at 9:36
  • Well it can be a little confusing for humans too. It's easier to skim some text looking for "x@y" than "x at y". Aug 11, 2009 at 14:03
7

Anti-Spambot Encoding ?

Of course the opposite then would be 'Anti-spambot Decoding' ;-)

But on a more serious note: I think @David is right with his 'munging'.
Even more specifically: Address munging would be the right term (according to Wikipedia).

1

I'd consider it a form of CAPTCHA. The Turing test being not so much the transformation "at"==@ and "dot"=dot, but finding and recognizing such disguised email addresses in a text that contains lots of other "at"s and perhaps even a few "dot"s.

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