Viraptor's dev-log

Message to all the people, who protected their email by changing “@” to AT and “.” to DOT. Thank you for making it easier to find.

Typically large number of emails are hard to find through google / other search engines. Thanks to email “protection” it’s just fun now. Why? Searching for “@gmail.com” on google will be probably the same as searching for “gmail com”, because special characters are stripped. You would expect to get many pages containing gmail addresses, but instead you get lots of pages talking about gmail.

Now that you’ve protected your email and it looks like “abcd AT example DOT com”, I can just google “at example dot com” and get your precious address. It’s great, because I’m sure it’s not a trap - why would you protect a trap address? Posting “abcd-(At]-example={doT)com” won’t help you either, as google ignores special characters - remember?

Now some stats from google:

• 2,100,000 for “at gmail dot com”
• 2,650,000 for “at gmail com” (thanks to pipermail!)
• 85,900 for +at “no spam” “dot com” and 255,000 for +at nospam “dot com” (you’d like to hide - wouldn’t you?)

These numbers are not very accurate of course. Some addresses will be duplicated across many pages and some pages will have multiple addresses included. Anyways - these are big numbers.

All modifications are of course easy to cancel - change at to “@”, dot to “.”, delete “no spam”, or “cut” written in any possible way, delete spaces and you’ve got a great email for spamming. Next time you try to protect your address (or even worse - my address) - please think what you’re doing. Thanks.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 16th, 2007 at 12:58 am and is filed under fun, security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.