Anyone know how those e-mail collecting bots work?

[ibneko]

, , , ,

ben

.juang

@

comcast

.net

Playing around, and wondering if the above would fool them?

Source be:
<table><tr><td>ben</td><font color=white>, </font><td>.juang</td><font color=white>, </font><td>@</td><font color=white>, </font><td>comcast</td><font color=white>, </font><td>.net</td></tr></table>

Granted, it makes little , above the e-mail, but I'm trying to reproduce the way livejournal did their e-mail thing in the userinfo page. Will look into it a bit later....

Maybe the same thing, with mmm... this:
<table><tr><td>ben</td><font color=white>E-</font><td>.juang</td><font color=white>ma</font><td>@</td><font color=white>il</font><td>comcast</td><font color=white>:</font><td>.net</td></tr></table>

resulting in:
E-mail:

ben

.juang

@

comcast

.net

[ edit ]
Granted, the color isn't necessary for the second modification... I just didn't remove it.
Can I remove the spacing inbetween the table cells? I ought to be able to.....
E-mail:

ben

.juang

@

comcast

.net

And the benefit of this is that if you just copy and paste, the spaces go away, even though it looks as if there are spaces. Whee~

[ edit 2 ]
Hm, yeah. cellspacing=0 and cellpadding=0 doesn't seem to do much. Grr..? My assumption is that those e-mail collecting bots ("spiders" that collect e-mail addresses to spam) work by loading a page, finding @ and .net/.com/.org things, and matching them together? Limited in... 30 characters? Forget the address e-mail specifications. And it skips over protection (such as separating them with random html tags) by stripping the page of html tags? I suppose one could invoke the HTML::Parser, although I haven't looked into how that works, and I dunno if one could use that to find e-mails anyways...? You know, some sort of library to make it appear to be what a human might see?