Talk:Email address use

E-mail obfuscation "study"

The Berkeley "study" cited in a recent modification to the article ("Freegeek.org (original): http://wiki.freegeek.org/index.php/Email_address_use") is not a study at all. It is a survey of various techniques that are thought to thwart spam address harvesters. While the author makes several postulations as to the effectiveness of these techniques, he did not actually perform experiments to test them. The Wikipedia address munging article is not much better, listing advantages and disadvantages without actually establishing how significant each is in the real world; the only real study on that page actually showed that simple address mangling is effective, as of 2003. (Of course, the note about using an easily Google-able pattern should be carefully considered). —Joe 13:50, 13 February 2008 (EST)