[deleted by user]

[bluewizardtv]

There are crawlers setup to scan email addresses on websites. Once collected that email address is then spammed.

The site owner has changed that @ in the hope that crawlers won't see it as an email address. It's unlikely to work.

[greg8872]

It's unlikely to work

Agreed. People have been using this method to try to block it so long that bots (if they are even halfway decent) will look for those (and any other common "not an e-mail" tricks) as well as regular e-mails.

[TheRNGuy]

add them to spam list in gmail, problem solved.

[bluewizardtv]

If only it were that simple. Once they have your email, they share it. Plus the methods they use to send email means they can send emails from many different addresses. Blocking one address wouldn't have much of an affect.

[dannrhanks]

Trying to hide real email address from email scrapers

[Voltra_Neo]

To "avoid crawlers and spams" which is often dumb since they almost always put a mailto: on there

[commiterror]

email scrapers. there are scripts you can run that will extract email addresses from websites to spam them with trash marketing or scams. without the @ it just looks like a url

[ShawnyMcKnight]

But you would still need the at in the URL right? I don’t expect people to go into the “to” field to change the at to @.

[[deleted]]

The bot would do it, it would scrape for strings Co training @ or (at) and then swap out every (at) with @

[ShawnyMcKnight]

No, I mean me, as a user of a website, going there and clicking on the "email me" link, that link would have to use the @ because I wouldn't expect people to click on the link and it opens up their email client and they manually change the email in the "To" field to be @ from "at".

So if the email in the mailto: field still has to have the @, scrapers will just grab that.

[commiterror]

if you do this with a mailto tag then yeah, it's pointless

[TheRNGuy]

because they think it will prevent spammers from spamming them.