No doubt many of you have noticed the new format for community members' email addresses on PearlSoup. For example: john@smith.com would appear as "john–at–smith–dot–com". It consists of the first part of your email address followed by "–at–", then the second part of your email address, followed by "–dot–" followed by the last part of the address.

We implemented this to reduce spam sent to PearlSoup community members who post their email addresses so that other members may contact them.

Unfortunately, there are automated software "robots" that spammers use to crawl the web and harvest email addresses wherever they appear on websites. While some sophisticated robots may be able to figure out an email address from our new format, this format should substantially reduce the likelihood that your email address will be added to spammers' lists in the future.

When you wish to send email to someone, you must first convert the "–at–" and "–dot–" back to their correct forms, "@" and "."

We hope this helps in the ongoing battle against spam on the internet.

Alex & Jeff
PearlSoup Co-founders