Email obfuscation: What still works in 2023?

• blame.email

  8 11 0.0 JavaScript

  client-side one-way email generator

  

While it doesn't stop spam, I have been using a catch-all email system for a while now.

The benefit is that I know where someone got my email from, and I can then try to figure out whether the place has been compromised, or whether they're selling my email, etc. And I can just blacklist that particular address forever as well.

Previously, I just did [email protected], but I've switched to something similar to blame.email [1].

This makes my emails look a little weirder, but it has stopped the weird looks I'd get when walking into a physical place, like my doctor, and telling them "Yeah, email me at @.com".

It also makes it less obvious that its effectively a throwaway email, particularly combined with my domain; it looks fitting. And since each address is salted and hashed, it pretty much eliminates the risk of someone successfullying trying to phish me by sending me an email to something like `[email protected]`.

Lastly, on my HN profile and elsewhere, I've got my "email", but despite them being unique, I still don't want to have to rotate it if it gets picked up by a spambot, so I've tried to do some plaintext simple "obfuscation" like in the article.

I went for

~АТ~ . -- with the "AT" being Cyrillic rather than Latin - I figure at least some will get tripped up by not being able to use purely English regex.

So far, I have yet to receive any spam with that strategy. Maybe I'm lucky or just not getting indexed, or maybe it's working a little.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31820502 / https://blame.email/

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