Don’t use (at)s instead of @s…
In the first years of web, we have been freely using our e-mails on internet like “my e-mail: michael@michael.com”. Later on, we realized that some spammer guys have collected our e-mails from our writings. We got angry.
So we tried to get rid of them and found new ways to write our e-mails on ‘net.
This is when we found (at) and [at].
Solution was quite easy. We knew that these guys are searching internet for @blabla.com and when they found an e-mail, collect it to spam. If we use (at) or [at]’s instead of @, spammers won’t get our e-mails and also people can easily understand (at) refers to @.
This is why you can see explanations like “my e-mail: michael(at)michael.com. Change (at) to @”.
A nice solution and it may work, may it not?
Not really! First days of this usage was successful. But today, thousands of people using this trick to get rid of spammers, so it’s easier for them to collect our e-mails when we are using (at)s.
Why? Because search engines won’t let you search for characters like @, [, (; so if you search for @hotmail.com using Google, you will only find the results for hotmail.com.
We may change our search query to see if (at)s are working. If we search for at hotmail.com, we would find any usage of it like: (at)hotmail.com, [at]hotmail.com, at hotmail.com etc.
As you can see, we can easily find thousands of e-mails with a simple search query. So what is the difference between @ and at?
As a conclusion, never use (at)s or [at]s instead of @s on internet. Because they are all spammable.
You can use websites which generate images of your e-mail adress or you can use JS codes which may mix your e-mail adress so spammers won’t get it. This should be a better way to protect your e-mail.
