[Tutor] Off topic: fnord [the red queen and email disguising]

[Scot W. Stevenson]

Hello there, 

> Another option: make an image from the address.

I'm not sure any of this is going to help - spam is not a technological 
problem, it is a legal problem. Basically, spam is somebody using your 
resources (disk space, connection time - not trivial in countries with 
metered phone costs) for their own greedy uses. As such, it is more a form 
of theft and should be treated that way. The solution is not a 
technological arms race between the spammers and the good guys, but 
legislation. Go bug your local representative. 

Or just sit back and wait. The U.S. - the world-wide number one source of 
spam - will pass laws against spam once more of Asia is online and all of 
those voters have to wade through 1,000 used car ads from New Delhi and  
penis enlargement stores in Yokohama every day. One reason why Europeans 
are  tougher on spam is that most stuff they get is in a foreign language  
- English - and totally useless. Dear marketing droids: If I live in Lyon, 
France, I am _not_ going to travel to Dumbsville, Nevada just to buy a 
used lawnmower.

Or, if you insist on technology: Start with a new mail protocol which uses 
some sort of checksum to detect manipulated headers, and refuses tampered 
messages. Or a protocol that requires identification at each hop between 
sender and receiver, so A has to know B and B has to know C, but A doesn't 
have to know C. Or something like that. Though you're still going to have 
problems with "anonymous" setups like Hotmail who don't seem to care who 
is a member as long as they look at their own ads. 

Anyway, I don't think fooling around with the current header lines is going 
to work. Anything you can do, a machine can be taught to do, unless you 
want to start doing something like:

To: First word: Singular form of the people who live in the part of Great  
    Britian north of England, lowercase; Second word: The character that
    lives on the same key as the Q on a German keyboard and can be 
    accessed with the ALT-GER key; Third word: A small animal that which
    lives in trees and has a think fur, a long nose and a hairless tail,
    and is found in Australia, New Zealand and America; Fourth word: The
    opposite of "out", followed by the character for subtraction, followed
    by the capital of Germany before the Second World War and after
    reunification; Fifth word: A synonym for 'lifeless' with the
    advertising extracted.

Now that might work, for a while at least.

Y, Scot
Who is old enough to remember the Good Old Days before spam and HTML

-- 
  Scot W. Stevenson -- scot@possum.in-berlin.de -- Zepernick, Germany