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I've always wondered why professors write their emails like this:

john dot doe @ harvard dot edu

I am trying to figure out some benefit of this but I can't think of one. It is definitely not more clear. It is more work if you are actually trying to email the person. Why not just write your actual email?

I come from math so maybe this is just a math thing? I have no idea.

user2768
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MathIsLife12
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2 Answers2

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It's most likely to avoid Email address harvesting. There are bots that scrape webpages to pick up email addresses for spam purposes. An easy way to avoid this is write your email in a way that's harder to read for a bot that's scanning for email addresses.

user2723984
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    It could be added that writing email addresses in the form "john dot doe at harvard dot edu" (or "joe dot bloggs at oxford dot ac dot uk" or equivalent) isn't a foolproof method for preventing harvesting. – J W Apr 27 '21 at 10:20
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    @JW It's perhaps foolproof against efficient harvesting – user2768 Apr 27 '21 at 11:44
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    The efficiency of this approach has been debated here already. – Wrzlprmft Apr 27 '21 at 11:45
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    And the time period that this was more prevalent (10+ years ago) is about when many departments insisted on creating web pages for all the professors, and is likely the last time any of them looked at them... – Jon Custer Apr 27 '21 at 13:34
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    @J W: When I first began in Stack Exchange (2011) I used "firstname period lastname at YAHOO period COM" in my profile because I thought by this time, and certainly in future years, harvesting methods would certainly know to convert "dot" and "at" to "." and "@". Plus, not writing my name in the email description likely provided additional protection. Something I used to do often in the UseNet group sci.math (late 1990s to early 2010s) was to use stuff like "tdtattve.rxenxfttrtot-at-xytahtoxo.tcoxm [remove all x's, t's]". – Dave L Renfro Apr 27 '21 at 13:56
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    This was a fad for some time, I think professors are just particularly well-preserved relics of their earlier days. – Bryan Krause Apr 27 '21 at 15:19
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    I wonder how often a computer science professor sees "john dot doe at harvard dot edu" and starts mentally programming the function required to de-obfuscate that email address. "john dot doe at harvard dot edu".replace(/\s*dot\s*/g,'.').replace(/\s*at\s*/g,'@') ... I guess the more difficult task would be to write a scraper bot that can spot the obfuscated email addresses in the first place. – Walter Stabosz Apr 27 '21 at 17:32
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    I put my email address in a JPEG image. If enough people did this, they would make the bots smart enough to find these also. – Mattman944 Apr 27 '21 at 23:21
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    Worth keeping in mind that this practice predates widespread Bayesian spam filtering. – Noah Snyder Apr 28 '21 at 00:22
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    If you put joe at gmail dot com into a JPEG image, I can't imagine it not being a good defense. Come on, the harvesters are not doing OCR are they? If you think they are, you can add in some camouflaging features, like what is seen in captchas. – Kaz Apr 28 '21 at 00:43
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    "An easy way to attempt to avoid this..." – Strawberry Apr 28 '21 at 09:27
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    For next-level obfuscation, check out this users profile https://superuser.com/users/1250181/xe%d0%bd%ce%b5i-%ce%9e%d1%8dn%d0%b2%cf%b5%cf%82 – spikey_richie Apr 28 '21 at 14:27
  • How about steven dot gubkin omit these four words at csuohio.edu ? – Steven Gubkin Apr 28 '21 at 15:15
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    @Kaz https://xkcd.com/810/ – user11153 Apr 28 '21 at 15:41
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    @BryanKrause Bingo. A professor's website is a perfect reflection of the way sites used to look like the year they got tenure, and this detail is no exception. :) – Federico Poloni Apr 28 '21 at 17:36
  • @BryanKrause As evidence of it being a fad, I recall this joke about it: https://www.reddit.com/r/starterpacks/comments/5n8b20/computer_science_professors_website_starter_pack/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 – Captain Man Apr 28 '21 at 22:13
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As user2723984 notes, academics often scramble their email addresses ostensibly to prevent web crawlers from harvesting their email address and spamming them. But it still allows humans to obtain their email address.

The effectiveness of this is debated. While it is true that more sophisticated web crawlers could circumvent much of this, most are not sophisticated. Thus it does help protect against generic spam (but that stuff is mostly caught by spam filters anyway).

However, most academics continue to receive plenty of academic spam. This is because academic spammers harvest email addresses from papers via repositories like arxiv, where people do not use any kind of protection. (I know this because I receive academic spam at email addresses that only are in my papers.)

At this point, I think it is more of a piece of academic culture than a well-motivated practice. At least in computer science, most people do it. This encourages others to copy the practice and so it carries on. Some people go a bit further, e.g., "firstinitial dot lastname at thisuniversity dot edu", where you must fill in the name of the university as well as their name. (I personally find these riddles annoying. I put my email in an image on my website, but with the usual riddle as alt-text for blind people.)

Thomas
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    "email in an image" I guess if you hate blind people... – Nobody Apr 27 '21 at 21:15
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    I recall that my dad once put his email address in an image on his resume. The funny thing was that when printed, the email address looked horrible, because the image was based on the screen-based rendering of the text, rather than the print-based rendering (which is several times higher in resolution). – Dan Henderson Apr 27 '21 at 21:32
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    @Nobody Good point. I do have alt-text for blind people. – Thomas Apr 27 '21 at 21:42
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    @Thomas - if you have alt-text, then a bot can read it just the same... This is another option I use (with an image as backup if javascript is not available). – IronEagle Apr 27 '21 at 21:58
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    @IronEagle the alt-text is still obfuscated. – Thomas Apr 28 '21 at 04:57
  • "I do have alt-text for blind people" Thanks. – Nobody Apr 28 '21 at 19:23
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    The effectiveness of this is debated – That's only an issue with using the literal words "dot" and "at". If you use more sophisticated methods like unicode reversal, it's a lot harder to get spammed. – forest Apr 29 '21 at 02:24
  • @forest: [citation needed] – PLL Apr 30 '21 at 14:35
  • @PLL For an anecdote at least, look at my about page. I never get spam. In order for a bot to work well when someone is using unicode reversal, homoglyphs, etc., it very often needs to actually render the page and then use OCR on the bitmap. To defeat people who use "at" and "dot", all it needs to do is add a little bit of regex. – forest May 01 '21 at 00:06