Address munging
Address munging is the practise of disguising, or munging, an E-mail address to prevent it being automatically collected and used by spammers.
| Table of contents |
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2 Methods 3 Examples 4 Disadvantages 5 See also 6 External links |
Intent
The intent of disguising an address is to prevent the use of software recognition while giving enough clues for a human reader to easily reconstruct the original address. An undisguised E-mail address in the form "no-one@example.com" is easily recognised by computer software, allowing large-scale harvesting of publicly available addresses. Addresses posted on usenet or webpages are both vulnerable to this. There is no need to use disguise on private E-mail as private messages between individuals are not subject to scanning by spammers. However E-mail sent to a mailing list, which is then archived or passed onto a usenet newsserver and made public, may eventually be scanned.
Methods
The most common method of disguising an address is to replace the "@" symbol with the word "at", and any "." with "(dot)" -- giving a result that does not look like an E-mail at all. Other methods involve manipulating the address so that it is incorrect but still recognisable as an address, and leaving human-readable instructions for recovery of the original in the signature block of the E-Mail or usenet post. However these methods are less satisfactory, as anything resembling an address will attract harvesters and attempts at spam. So the following points are important:
- Ensure the disguised version is not someone else's E-mail address. This can be done by appending the reserved top level domain .invalid to the end.
- If you are disguising an address by adding text, then add it to the right-hand side of the "@" not the left. This prevents your internet service provider's mail server from having to handle undeliverable mail.
Examples
| Disguised address | How to recover the original address |
|---|---|
| no-one at example dot org | Replace "at" with "@", and "dot" with "." |
| no-one@elpmaxe.co.uk.invalid | Reverse domain name example remove .invalid |
| ten.elpmaxe@eno-on | Reverse the entire address |
| no-one@exampleREMOVEME.com.invalid | Instructions in the address itself; remove .invalid |
| no-one@exampleARCHIMEDES.com.invalid | Remove the mathematician; remove .invalid |
| no-one@example.com.invalid; s/example/no-where/ | Substitute no-where for example; remove .invalid; See Sed for a description of the s// syntax |
Disguising addresses makes it more difficult for people to send E-mail to each other and is, at best, a workaround for the problem of spam. When posting to usenet it should also be noted that disguising an email address is, in the strictest terms, a violation of RFC 1036. This RFC describes the format of usenet messages and requires a valid email address in the From: field of the post. In practise, few people follow this so strictly.Disadvantages