Mailhandler. Graceful E-Mail Obfuscation. In “Win the SPAM Arms Race” (A List Apart, May 2002), Dan Benjamin talked about the importance of hiding e-mail addresses on our websites from vicious, e-mail address harvesting bots—or spam bots, as they are more often called.
Dan pioneered a JavaScript-based solution for bypassing the indexing mechanisms that spam bots use. Here’s a quote from the article: Posting a naked e-mail link anywhere on the web (or in a newsgroup, in a chatroom, on a weblog comments page…) is generally the kiss of death for your once-healthy address. It’s hard to believe, but it’s been more than five years since Dan wrote these words.
So, did we win the SPAM Arms Race?