This is for everyone who uses things like HAX[AT]LIFE.COM to post their email addresses, ostensibly so that spam spiders won't find their emails. Well, I probably don't have to say this but, since everyone uses essentially the same system, this method doesn't really work.
Just Google the following to see what I'm talking about:
*[at](hotmail|gmail|hushmail|yahoo).com
Next brilliant spam-prevention technique, plzkthx.
April 8th, 2008 at 2:50 am
This is pretty simple, but is probably a little more difficult for spammers to abuse than the method you mentioned.
How about simply having the email address stored as an image, much like a captcha? You could even vary the way the image is displayed randomly on page load, for example using different fonts to decrease the chance that it is defeated.
April 8th, 2008 at 6:05 pm
Yeah, I actually wrote about something like that here, and I think it's a fairly good idea, except that it will only work as long as spammers don't use OCR software, which they will in a hurry if everyone switches to images.