[Mailman-Developers] Interesting study -- spam on posted addresses...

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Tue, Feb 19, 2002 at 04:46:24AM -0500, Damien Morton wrote:
> > Jay R. Ashworth writes:
> > Well, neither the JavaScript *nor* the picture are going to 
> > do me much good on the two browsers I use most often: Lynx 
> > 2.8.3 in a konsole window... and GoWeb 6 on my Palm/Minstrel handheld.
> > 
> > The former may not be especially mainstream, but anyone who 
> > ignores the latter category (not to mention my blind friend's 
> > screen reader) does so at their peril.
> 
> I was wondering how long it would be before someone brought up the case
> for Lynx. Blind people I had not though about, although I had thought
> about text based reverse turing tests.

:-)

> I know nothing of this GoWeb 6 that you speak of, youll have to describe
> it to me, but I assume its some kind of transcoding browser that doesnt
> handle images very well.

It's the browser on my wireless handheld, and, in general, it doesn't
handle images *at all*.  Nor will the microbrowsers on some people's
cell phones.

> So one solution would be to have both public and private archives. The
> public archives have the email addresses obfuscated in some way, the
> private archives would not.

Oh.  We're talking about *archives*?  Silly me.  I thought we were
talking about maintainer addresses on sign-up pages.

> List members, and those able to pass a reverse turing test, would have
> access to the private archives, while the rest of the world would have
> access to the public archives.
> 
> Once we are talking about both public are private archives, however, we
> are probably also talking about the use of a cgi script which renders
> emails on the fly, depending on some kind of authentication. A cookie,
> perhaps.
> 
> Thoughts?

It's ASCII text.  It's useful.  Making it into something else makes it
less useful, and as I noted in another posting, reduces the incentive
to locate the spammers and commit arson upon their persons and
property.

Cheers,
-- jr 'closed captioned for the humor impaired' a

-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra@baylink.com
Member of the Technical Staff     Baylink                             RFC 2100
The Suncoast Freenet         The Things I Think
Tampa Bay, Florida        http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

   "If you don't have a dream; how're you gonna have a dream come true?"
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