Neat trick against email harvesting

A visitor left me a comment where he left me his address in the comment text. Interestingly, he used a Tiny URL instead. I’ve used tiny urls for a long time, but it didn’t dawn on me that I could use it for other protocols as well. This is nice because email harvesting tools will not know this is an email address, unless they were to follow the link and the redirect. Unfortunately, if this were to catch on, it would only be a small matter of programming before they could game it. It was cute while it lasted.

Examples:

• mailto:me@example.org becomes http://tinyurl.com/ed3ns
• notes:///names.nsf becomes http://tinyurl.com/g2o7x
• [your own] becomes [another tinyurl]