Email address, why in this form?

[Jaikiran Pai]

I see a lot of people mentioning their email address, on some sites, in this form:
abc at somecompany dot com instead of [e-mail]. Is there any specific reason for this? (Just curious)

[David O'Meara]

Do you mean JavaRanch in general or just MD?

Some people want immediate responses and hope responders will send replies via email. We typically discourage this since it doesn't help anyone else. We like a record so that others can benefit from the solution too.

[Mani Ram]

From what I understand - the actual question was, why people write their email address as
abc at somecompany dot com instead of [e-mail]

[Jaikiran Pai]

Do you mean JavaRanch in general or just MD?

I meant in general. Not specific to Javaranch or MD. Here's *just an example*:
JBoss Forum

Here's the extract from that post:

Please send me your "Hello World" sfsb then. ben dot wang at jboss dot com. I will give it a try to see what is different.

Note the words marked in bold. I have observed this in many sites where people mention their email addresses in this format(i.e. using the word "at" instead of @ and "dot" instead of '.')

Not sure why
[ July 14, 2006: Message edited by: jaikiran pai ]

[Jaikiran Pai]

From what I understand - the actual question was, why people write their email address as
abc at somecompany dot com instead of [e-mail]

You got it absolutely right

[Jim Yingst]

It's nothing special about this site. Throughout the internet, many people avoid posting their email address publicly because that can make it more likely that you may receive spam from someone. Typically spammers use programs to find e-mail addresses autmatically, and [e-mail] is easily recognizable as an e-mail address. By writing abc at somecompany dot com, it becomes harder for spammer to recognize the e-mail address programmatically - while most humans with any common sense can still figure out what the address really is.

[Jaikiran Pai]

Typically spammers use programs to find e-mail addresses autmatically, and [e-mail] is easily recognizable as an e-mail address

That answers it. Thanks Jim

[Eric Pascarello]

oh my.....I thought it was common sense.....

Eric

[Pradeep bhatt]

Originally posted by Eric Pascarello:
oh my.....I thought it was common sense.....

Eric

I dont think so.

[Cp Baherwani]

Common sense is very uncommon

Some people make an image of their email address and post it on websites. Thus the reader need not decode the 'dot', 'at', 'underbar' and spammers won't be able to read it. Makes more sense.

Uncommon sense would be
IMG SRC="http://xxx.com/email.gif" alt="[e-mail]">

[ July 14, 2006: Message edited by: Chandra Prakash Baherwani ]

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Another one I've seen is:

[e-mail] (remove clothes to send).

[Jeroen T Wenting]

strip naked before sending an email?

[Jaikiran Pai]

[e-mail] (remove clothes to send).

Now, whoever it is, this is creativity at its best


[ July 16, 2006: Message edited by: jaikiran pai ]

[Mark Spritzler]

Or some people create a Spam Email address to use when posting in forums. One like [e-mail]

Mark

[Scott Selikoff]

I see a lot of people that use images as there e-mail addresses to avoid getting picked up by spammers.