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newscrackertoday at 6:03 AM1 replyview on HN

> HTML entities are often decoded automatically by server-side libraries, which means that even the most basic harvesters can get your email addresses without any special effort. This technique should be worthless—and, yet, it still stops most harvesters.

Anecdotal, but I’ve used HTML entities on a public static website for a long time using an href tag with mailto, and yet I’ve not seen any spam.

I guess any spammer who uses some level of GenAI to process and extract email addresses would have a lot more success against all the methods listed in this article.


Replies

cirodurantoday at 7:51 AM

I wouldn't think it's very cost effective to apply GenAI to extract email addresses