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Comment by 1cvmask | Hacker News Reader

This is the coolest way I have seen someone write their email and avoid email harvesting bots:

For inquiries related to this book, use x@joyofcryptography.com, where x is the author's first name.

Nearly everyone with a high school education can “crack” that puzzle and figure out his email and yet most bots will fail.

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i'd guess that bots these days harvest domain names and then human names associated with them and then spam tools try common schemes for constructing email addresses. don't know for sure though.

i always thought the hotness would be to encrypt the address in source text and render/decrypt it client side in javascript, but i suppose scrapers these days use full blown headless browsers complete with javascript runtimes.

I prefer cmlja2FzdGxleQ== at example.com, for instance, if the target audience is tech literate.

lol, nice one.

RFC 5321 requires compliant domains to have both a "postmaster" and an "abuse" email address (e.g. postmaster@joyofcryptography.com). This technique will not stop a flood of spam emails to x@joyofcryptography.com, which will end up in the postmaster inbox.

Not sure what you mean.

Mail to the literal 'x@joyofcryptography.com' address would just be dropped. There's no expectation that mail to a nonexistent address would be placed in the postmaster mailbox.

Its a very old technique from the 90s actually!

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