I've been coding for over 20 years now! (WOAH, do I feel old)
I've touched just about every resource imaginable under the Sun (too bad they were bought out by Oracle)
"Most email harvesters are advanced enough to detect common patterns"
The obfuscation technique used here is actually easier for bots to decode than adding things like [at] instead of @ in the text.
Common web scarping language, like PHP, have a built in method to decode HTML encoded entities, and the bots use these.
As noted in my article, this solution is meant for mailto links themselves, where you can't obscure your email with things like [AT]. That's when the next best solution is to encode your email when you insist to use a mailto link at all.
Solutions like this one are never going to solve everything due to security through obscurity, but it at least gets rid of the scraping bots that can't decode these entities.
Of course, a more effective solution would be not to use mailto links at all and obscure your email effectively as you said. However, the article was about when you do have a mailto link. :p
This is an example of Security through obscurity: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_thr...
"Most email harvesters are advanced enough to detect common patterns"
The obfuscation technique used here is actually easier for bots to decode than adding things like [at] instead of @ in the text.
Common web scarping language, like PHP, have a built in method to decode HTML encoded entities, and the bots use these.
As noted in my article, this solution is meant for mailto links themselves, where you can't obscure your email with things like [AT]. That's when the next best solution is to encode your email when you insist to use a mailto link at all.
Solutions like this one are never going to solve everything due to security through obscurity, but it at least gets rid of the scraping bots that can't decode these entities.
Of course, a more effective solution would be not to use mailto links at all and obscure your email effectively as you said. However, the article was about when you do have a mailto link. :p
or you could hide the email link behind a captcha check which would do a better job at fighting bots