Address munging is the practice of disguising, also known as munging, an e-mail address to prevent it from being automatically collected and used as a target for people and organizations who send unsolicited bulk e-mail. Address munging is intended to disguise an e-mail address in a way that prevents computer software from seeing the real address, or even any address at all, but still allows a human reader to reconstruct the original and contact the author: an email address such as, "no-body@example.com", becomes "no-body at example dot com", for instance. Any e-mail address posted in public is likely to be automatically collected by computer software used by bulk emailers — a process known as e-mail address harvesting — and addresses posted on webpages, Usenet or chat rooms are particularly vulnerable to this. Private e-mail sent between individuals is highly unlikely to be collected, but e-mail sent to a mailing list that is archived and made available via the web or passed onto a Usenet news server and made public, may eventually be scanned and collected.
Disguising addresses makes it all the more difficult for people to send e-mail to each other. Many see it as an attempt to fix a symptom rather than solving the real problem of e-mail spam, at the expense of causing problems for innocent users. However, legitimate replies may be lost by this technique. If the email address is not the user's true email id, then it should be a completely invalid one otherwise some other server or address may get the spam for it. Disguising e-mail address in a systematic manner (for example, user[at]domain[dot]com), is just as bad as not disguising the address at all as such addresses can be revealed through a simple Google Search. Transparent address munging is another method used where in the actual email address is obfuscated from automated email harvesters, by displaying all or part of the email on a web page as an image, a text logo shrunken to normal size using automated CSS, or as a jumbled text with the order of the letters restored with CSS. Building the link by client-side scripting using server-side scripting to run a contact form.
Disguising addresses makes it all the more difficult for people to send e-mail to each other. Many see it as an attempt to fix a symptom rather than solving the real problem of e-mail spam, at the expense of causing problems for innocent users. However, legitimate replies may be lost by this technique. If the email address is not the user's true email id, then it should be a completely invalid one otherwise some other server or address may get the spam for it. Disguising e-mail address in a systematic manner (for example, user[at]domain[dot]com), is just as bad as not disguising the address at all as such addresses can be revealed through a simple Google Search. Transparent address munging is another method used where in the actual email address is obfuscated from automated email harvesters, by displaying all or part of the email on a web page as an image, a text logo shrunken to normal size using automated CSS, or as a jumbled text with the order of the letters restored with CSS. Building the link by client-side scripting using server-side scripting to run a contact form.
