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

[Sheila King]

On Sun, 30 Sep 2001 10:22:52 +0200, Gerhard Häring
<gh_pythonlist at gmx.de> wrote in comp.lang.python in article
<mailman.1001838274.4521.python-list at python.org>:

: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.

I also tried (about a year or two ago) obscuring my address. I did it in
such a way (unintended) that that mail also ended up in an account of
mine, and was surprised at the number of people who sent me mail there.
And some of it was...well, not important correspondence, but at least
Usenet chit-chat that I probably wanted to receive. (Stuff that hadn't
been posted to the newsgroup, and people would think I was ignoring them
if I didn't reply.) But the kicker was, some other people in the
newsgroup obscured their address in really creative ways, and despite
instructions in their sig file, I could figure out how to fix the
address in order to send mail to them. I didn't want people to have that
much difficulty sending mail to me. So I quickly stopped doing that.

On mailing lists, I just use my real address. I guess some people get
throw away addys for such stuff, but I don't want to be dealing with
signing up for new accounts all the time. Too much trouble.

I do run a Python mail filter on my "real" email account. It checks the
incoming email against a "whitelist" and if it is a whitelist email, it
forwards to a secret addy that I've never used publicly, which I POP my
mail from. Otherwise, if the mail doesn't check out against the
whitelist, it gets forwarded to my spamcop.net account.

Now the spamcop.net address is a real one. I use it for Usenet posting
and for signing up for web site registration stuff. I get surprisingly
little spam sent to that address. Which is what makes it so good for
posting publicly. It's also easy to report spam that is forwarded to or
directly sent to that address. The weird thing is, even though I'm post
to Usenet with a real address, some people think it's not a valid
address (guess they've been stung by the difficulty of replying to an
obscured address too many times). But I don't really expect or desire
private replies to Usenet posts. I'd prefer to keep discussion in the
newsgroup. Nevertheless, the option is there for people to reply
privately.

: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.

Certainly following such a convention would be only too easy for
spammers to remove and get the real address? I mean, they can automate
the process too easily.

:> > 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.

I've often thought, that email addresses with the string "spam" just get
discarded. Otherwise, I don't know why I get so few spam emails sent to
my spamcop.net address.

--
Sheila King
http://www.thinkspot.net/sheila/
http://www.k12groups.org/