What is email scraping?
Everyone knows that websites tend to display contact details, whether it is on a contact page or displayed at the top of the screen in a header.
These contact details normally contain an email address highlighted as a link. A custom made script, maybe a spider would crawl these sites and gather emails to sell to people at a price. Thus making money from your details.
Ways of prevention
There has been many different ways to prevent email to being scraped. Some developers when writing out emails use (at) instead of @ in there email addresses. For example randomname(at)email.com instead of randomname@email.com. Another method is to encode the email address using ASCII. such as @ which is a ASCII representation of @. There are even services that allows you to encode email addresses.
The problem
To be honest I am not even sure if taking these procedures can prevent email scraping just mainly reduce it. And from my knowledge these are the only methods. If anyone would like to give any input on this situation please do. I don’t think the problem is as big as it was a couple of years back but it is still a problem.
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