Why do people write dot com

I don't think I ever bothered to obfuscate even when I did include contact links. To avoid email harvesting spam-bots. As if someone can't write a Perl script to make the appropriate substitutions.

Academics have a vested interest in being very public facing at times - it's easier to be contacted by potential students, collaborators, the media, etc. And there isn't an incentive to hide your particular identity behind a large-scale corporate account hr fakecompany.

Putting your email address out in the world, in plain text, is a recipe for having it harvested by spam-bots. Examples like the one you give are an attempt to make the address marginally less machine readable while still making it perfectly human readable. Because those people in academia or elsewhere didn't learn proper ways to protect their e-mail addresses from spam bots.

Edit: I'm not sure how can I expand this without repeating Peter Schneider's comment. It is naive to believe that email collecting script would not be able to do basic regex substitution which defeats the use of dot instead of. People writing their e-mails this way just make them less readable for people, not for bots. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group.

Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Why do people in academia tend to write their email address with " dot ", " at ", instead of ".

Asked 6 years, 1 month ago. Active 6 years, 1 month ago. Viewed 18k times. Improve this question. I've seen this trend outside of academia too, mostly by technical people e. As I understand it, it's a rudimentary trick to defeat programs that look through webpages trying to find email addresses to spam.

Don't know if that's the whole story, though. Let's face it: if I want to farm mail addresses by crawling the web, I'll quickly hack up a regexp that defeats most feeble attempts at disguising them like the one you reference.

The level of protection can be estimated to be nearly zero. I suspect that there are far more efficient ways to far valid email addresses nowadays. I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is not specific to academia.

People outside academia do this as much as people inside academia. Did I miss any important ones in the list above? Anyone have a theory as to why some companies persist in differentiating based on dots while others dropped them long ago?

Perhaps this is simply one of those standards that will never really be standardized across services. For you. World globe An icon of the world globe, indicating different international options.

Get the Insider App. Click here to learn more. A leading-edge research firm focused on digital transformation. Good Subscriber Account active since Shortcuts. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. It is a simple form of spam protection against automated spambots that find e-mail addresses by matching those particular characters. People generally write their email address like that on publicly accessible sites in hopes that web spiders run by spammers will not detect it as an email address, and therefore will not send them spam.

However, any halfway decent web spider should be able to decode 'example at webpage dot com' as an email address, so its mostly a vain effort and is best to just not post your email if spam is a concern. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Collectives on Stack Overflow. Learn more. Why write 'at' and 'dot' in email rather than ' ' and '.

Asked 9 years, 3 months ago. Active 1 year, 9 months ago. Viewed 54k times. Improve this question. Stat-R Stat-R 4, 8 8 gold badges 38 38 silver badges 63 63 bronze badges. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes.