Off-topic: hiding your email address - don't bother...

[Gerhard Häring]

On Sun, Sep 30, 2001 at 03:29:33AM -0400, Peter Hansen wrote:
> chris liechti wrote:
> > 
> > i immediatly removed my nospam string in the address. it's not helping
> > anyway:
> 
> I'm curious how much it might help.  I have used no hiding techniques
> and within a few minutes after *every* posting (possibly with the 
> odd exception, but I don't think so) I get a single spam message from
> some random account.  Later on I get others.  Does this happen to others?
> What about those with various forms of "nospam"?

Not to me. I have both gerhard <at> bigfoot <dot> de and gerhard <dot>
nospam <dot> bigfoot <dot> de. I receive spam on the nospam address, but
also on my normal address. I even have an autoresponder running on the
nospam address that basically says "remove the nospam". But it's not
working as well as I expected. Most people just hit reply and thus I
have to check the mails to the nospam address anyway (though on a less
regular basis). And I am subscribed to diverse mailing lists et
al. and use my regular address, too.

So, I think the nospam might work, but you must be sure *never* to use
the normal address.

I'm almost convinced it's a bad idea after all.

I think it would be better not to include an email address at all. But
current usenet and email software doesn't allow this. There's also the
convention of adding ".invalid" to mark an invalid address.

> > some spammers are surely clever enough to detect such fake emails and they
> > may even correct it. (removing spaces, replacing 'at'=='@', remove strings
> > like 'no.spam' etc. isn't a big thing, is it?)

I don't think that they bother with that.

Gerhard
-- 
mail:   gerhard <at> bigfoot <dot> de       registered Linux user #64239
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reduce(lambda x,y:x+y,map(lambda x:chr(ord(x)^42),tuple('zS^BED\nX_FOY\x0b')))
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