[TriLUG] email obfuscating

[Justin Johnson]

> Personally, I don't care either way whether the archive has e-mail
> addresses munged or not.  The way I look at it, eventually, spam
> harvesters will get my e-mail address one way or another, and I'll end
> up running filtering software like spamassasin on the receiving end to
> decrease the annoyance.  Removing trilug as a vector would be great,
> but, IMHO, a drop in the bucket overall.

Ok, I have to ask. How likely is it that spam harvesters will get my email
address in the way mentioned here? I set up a dummy Yahoo email account a
long time ago, and I _always_ use that email address for any form or
registration online. There are accounts that I eventually end up editing my
profile with my real email address, but only after I know that they don't
sell me out to spammers. This has worked for me quite well for the past
several years. I very rarely get spam in my inbox of any kind. All this
while my 'real' email address is in the body of most messages I post to
groups such as this one, and others.

I guess I am trying to qualify how serious a worry this should be. In my
experience, it isn't one at all.

One last trick. To find out if a site that I give my email address to will
sell me out, I will purposefully 'tag' my name when I register. Either
misspell it on purpose, or use a part of the site name as part of my name.
If I then later get an email in my Yahoo account from a site other than the
one I signed up at, I know that they are punks! ;-)

So am I lucky, or what? I am knocking on particle board, having written this
in defiance of the spam god, The Mighty Hormel.

BTW - did ya hear that the speed of light may not be constant after all?

Later,
Justin