[TriLUG] email obfuscating

[Jeremy Portzer]

On 12 Aug 2002, Thunder Bear wrote:

> On Mon, 2002-08-12 at 18:44, Joey O'Doherty wrote:
> > I was browsing the trilug email archives and I noticed that email 
> > addresses in the body of a message (eg in a signature) are available in 
> > all their glory for spam harvesters.  Is there any hope of obfuscating 
> > them automatically in the archives?  Or should they be spam-proofed from 
> > the user side anyway?
> 
> [vice chair hat off]
> 
> IMHO, this should be up to the end users.  I have a bad feeling in my
> stomach about altering the body of a message, no matter how good the
> intentions are.  Who am I to second guess the intentions of someone who
> puts their email address in the body of their message?

I agree with Chris.  Many people include obfuscated email addresses in 
their signatures instead of the real address, so I would suggest you do 
that if you're really concerned.  Personally I don't use a signature at 
all, so it's not a problem. :-)

At one point, we had mailman's archive feature set up to "munge" all email
addresses in the archives, but it caused more problems than it's worth.  
So we reverted to the standard setup.

Note that this is a public list -- anyone can join... so a dedicated 
spammer could join the list if they really want to.  And other public 
archive sites can join, too, such as :
	http://www.mail-archive.com/trilug@trilug.org/

Regards,
Jeremy