There collection of emails (email harvesting in English, which means reap) is the acquisition of email addresses for unfair advertising, phishing attacks, and spreading malware. Specialized programs, which are robot harvesters emails, or spambots, comb websites, contact lists, forums and social networks for email addresses. The characteristic syntax of email addresses provides clues to identify the desired information. For example, robots perform searches in source texts with the @ sign. Indeed, this sign is generally not used as such in texts, but only to separate the user’s name from the domain in email addresses. Descriptions also offer insufficient protection. Sophisticated spambots often include other spellings, like [at], [AT], (at) Or (AT) in their research:
user@domain.fr
user[at]domain.fr
If the @ sign or its equivalents contain two terms separated by a period, this is a clear indication that it is indeed an email address. There description of the characteristic point before the top level domain also provides weak protection, and reduces readability.
user[AT]domain[POINT]Fr
There HTML email reference is even more treacherous, as in the example “mailto:user@domain.fr”. This allows website visitors to open their favorite email program with one click, and the recipient’s address is automatically copied into the corresponding field. This is certainly convenient, but it also allows spambots to clearly understand that this is an email address ready to be captured. Therefore, website operators sometimes try to force classic patterns to provide email addresses. However, it is important to maintain optimal readability for Internet users in order to allow unobstructed access to email addresses.
