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

[Gerhard Häring]

On Fri, Sep 28, 2001 at 11:57:22PM -0500, Skip Montanaro wrote:
> 
> (My apologies for the off-topic post.> 

Despite being (mostly) off-topic, I found your post quite interesting.

> [...] 
> I bet you know the conclusion of this missive: Don't bother trying to
> protect your email address.  Resistance is futile.

The problem is well-known, but still unsovled. To put it in one
sentence: spamming is cheap. As long as we don't change that, spamming
will continue.

> If you want to filter out spam, find a service you like that filters
> email (like SpamCop or your ISP), learn how to use procmail, or learn
> to write sendmail milters in Python or get Jason Mastaler's TMDA
> system that works with QMail (there - I snuck in *two* Python code
> references into my message so it's not off-topic!).

I use Postfix, but I would be able to put a Python filtering script
there, too.

> In short, do something that stands a real chance of helping.

I follow the discussions it the "Internet mail 2000" project originally
started by D. J. Bernstein, the qmail developer and security wiz:
http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html

A few more Python people surely won't hurt. Especially we could quickly
provide a prototype, something which would take the C(++) folks a long
time :-)

Basically replacing SMTP sure is an ambitious project. It would take
some marketing power, like only making access to the python list
available to the new system :-) Of course, one would need to get some
big companies into the boat as well.

Cheers,

Gerhard
-- 
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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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