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Munging

Vangie Beal
Last Updated November 3, 2023 12:12 am

(MUHN-jing) Munging (address munging), is the act of altering an email address posted on a Web page to make it unreadable to bots and harvesters that crawl the Web for email addresses to include on spam lists. Munging is where the e-mail address is not fully written out but is still understandable to anyone reading the Web page. The characters to the left of the @ symbol in your e-mail address should not be altered when munging.

For example, munging the [email protected] could result in something like fakeaddress-AT-webopedia-DOT-com.

The term munge is frequently defined as “mash until no good” and is also called address munging.