From: Nikolai Weibull <ruby-talk@...>
Date: 2003-10-22T17:45:07+09:00
Subject: Re: Email Harvesting

* Ryan Dlugosz <ryan@dlugosz.net> [Oct, 22 2003 10:26]:
> Nikolai Weibull said:
> > with parsing emails from usenet.  would it be possible for someone to
> > take care of this?
>
> My $.02 = Attempting to hide all the emails does more harm than good... it
> really only makes it harder for people to contact you who have a genuine
> reason to do so (i.e. - with a Ruby question).  As far as spam goes, not
> publishing your email address certainly helps, but the first time a friend
> or relative sends you an electronic "greeting card" you're sunk.
>
> Perhaps the effort would be better spent on improving anti-spam systems...
> Personally, I find the Bayesian-ish approach of bogofilter to be quite
> good.  I catch ~100 spams per day & only one or two get through.  More
> attention (and contributions) to projects like this would improve the
> situation much more than going through web archives & mangling email
> addresses.
Hey, I don't have problems capturing spam, I just don't want it reaching
me, period.  Parsing out email addresses does make it harder to respond
to people, yes, and that is often not a problem.  If you're mailing to a
mailing list, you expect people to reply to the mailing list, not the
email address you sent from.  And if people really want to contact you,
they can probably understand the parsed email, such as
	ruby-talk at pcppopper dot org
or some less obvious parsing,
	nikolai

--
::: name: Nikolai Weibull    :: aliases: pcp / lone-star / aka :::
::: born: Chicago, IL USA    :: loc atm: Gothenburg, Sweden    :::
::: page: www.pcppopper.org  :: fun atm: gf,lps,ruby,lisp,war3 :::
main(){printf(&linux["\021%six\012\0"],(linux)["have"]+"fun"-97);}