an anti-spam measure

[sunsunmoon]

Contact Us
(please change the <at> to @ - this is an anti-spam measure)

Is measure correct? Would it be correct to say "technique" instead?

[Rover_KE]

It's possible, but measure is just about perfect in this context.

Rover

[sunsunmoon]

Actually, replacing @ with AT is an anti-spam measure, isn't it?

[Rover_KE]

I don't know about that, sunsunmoon.

I was hoping somebody else might answer.

Rover

[SirGod]

Actually, replacing @ with AT is an anti-spam measure, isn't it?

It is, but it is not very efficient, in my opinion. I think that today's e-mail bots (in this case, software made to check pages for e-mail addresses (for spam messages)) can manage that. I would recommend you to display the e-mail address within an image. That way, the bot needs to read the image (OCR - optical character recognition) and it will probably not be capable of doing that.

[Tdol]

I agree with SirGod- today's bots are sophisticated enough to get past such measures. An image is better, but even that is dangerous- what they can't read today, they'll be able to read soon.

[SirGod]

Tdol, they actually can. But they can't read all of them, there is not a universal image reader (yet).
You can display the image with multiple fonts, different font size, noisy background etc. and all these things will drastically reduce image's readability. I think it will be almost impossible for a bot to read it unless it is programmed to read your image.
But these are drastic measures, no one will bother to build custom bots just for you. As Tdol said, in the near future even this measures will be obsolete.

[Tdol]

Yes- they can get through captchas easily enough. A homemade image would work, but they way they work around security measures is quite astonishing, so I would still worry that one day they will catch up- they have done with just about everything else.