Y/hoo? H/tmail?

[Hallavast]

I've been noticing for a while that people often use words like "h/tmail" or "y/hoo" seemingly in place of the words "yahoo" and "hotmail" when describing their email or IM addresses/screennames. I can't figure out why, though. Surely someone in the playground could enlighten me? Do these terms mean something other than what I think they mean? If not, then what's the point in using them? The "/" stands in place of one letter. Would it not be easier to simply type the word?

[Ego Slayer]

Where have you seen people saying that? Looks like the "/" would be to bypass a filter, or some such. :smallconfused:

[UglyPanda]

It's the same as using (at) instead of @, it's so a spambot won't read your E-mail address.

[Hallavast]

I've basically seen them in online personal ads and on social networking sites like myspace and facebook.

Using them as an anti-spam filter makes sense. I don't know why I didn't think of that earlier... :smallannoyed:

Thanks!

[ghost_warlock]

Where have you seen people saying that? Looks like the "/" would be to bypass a filter, or some such. :smallconfused:

Yeah, this is probably an instance of Getting Crap Past the Censors. I can see it being used a lot on online dating sites to relay contact information so that potentially interested individuals could e-mail the person without having to make payments to the dating site.

[valadil]

I've basically seen them in online personal ads and on social networking sites like myspace and facebook.

Using them as an anti-spam filter makes sense. I don't know why I didn't think of that earlier... :smallannoyed:

Thanks!

I'm pretty sure this is why someone would do that. Maybe the spambots can finally parse name -at- hotmail -dot- com. It's just another way to obfuscate an email address from a robot but not a human.

[Castaras]

We used that in the years I played Runescape. Horrible censors meant that you had to say I-Like-Cheese(at)H/tmail.com.

[Mc. Lovin']

It's the same as using (at) instead of @, it's so a spambot won't read your E-mail address.

Hoooo that's clever, thanks!

[Don Julio Anejo]

As said before, there's bots that randomly scan webpages for email addresses.

[email protected] follows a standard email format. me(at)hotmail.com doesn't and the bot won't be able to read it and won't be able to send email to it. Same with things like me @ hotmail . com (facebook did this) or me@h/tmail.com.

[thubby]

of course, it would take a very simple bit of programing to work in those tricks.

[Don Julio Anejo]

Except you'd need to account for a few dozen ways of doing this, which will slow down email harvesting quite a bit.

[valadil]

It's trivial to program around these things, but it's not worth the trouble. I'd wager that no more than 10% of email addresses out there are being obscured in this or any other fashion. Why bother adding these cases when you're already able to collect most email addresses out there.

The best obfuscation I've seen so far was someone who lined up a series of images of letters taken from brand logos to spell out his email address. Something like that is not getting cracked in the near future, but I've only ever seen one person go to that level of effort.