Don’t use (at)s instead of @s…

In the first years of the web, we have been freely using our e-mails on the internet like “my e-mail: michael@michael.com”. Later on, we realized that some spammer guys had 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].

The solution was quite easy. We knew that these guys were searching the internet for @blabla.com and when they found an e-mail address, collected 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! The first days of this usage were successful. But today, thousands of people use 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 the internet. Because they are all spammable.

You can use websites that generate images of your e-mail address or you can use JS codes which may mix your e-mail address so spammers won’t get it. This should be a better way to protect your e-mail.