Hide your e-mail address from spam crawlers

Question

According to Security SE it is highly recommendable to cover your email address in publicly available documents. I'm aware of the discussion about handling email addresses as images: Crawler Resistance Email Address

Anyhow, I'm looking for a non-image solution to this problem: Is there the possibility to make use of Unicode characters (that might be not recognized by the crawler software) in combination with XeTeX?

Answer 1

the randtext package may help; its ctan catalogue entry says

<description>
The package provides a single macro <tt>\randomize{TEXT}</tt> that
typesets the characters of <tt>TEXT</tt> in random order, such that
the resulting output appears correct, but most automated attempts
to read the file will misunderstand it.

This function allows one to include an email address in a TeX
document and publish it online without fear of email address
harvesters or spammers easily picking up the address.
</description>

of course, it’s not proof against ocr, but it provides another way to approach the problem.

Answer 2

You can do this: [𝚖𝘺𝗻𝕒𝒎𝕖@𝕖𝕩𝙖𝘮𝓅𝖑𝙚.𝖼𝘰𝗺] instead of myname@example.com but note this is real text so a non-spam user isn't prevented from copying the address and perhaps not noticing that it is unlikely to work. (If the bit between [ and ] isn't readable you may need to install some fonts to cover that range)