[TriLUG] email obfuscating

[Mike Broome]

On Tue, Aug 13, 2002 at 09:19:50AM -0400, Jeremy Portzer wrote:
> 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. :-)

But it's not just signatures that put non-munged addresses in the body
of an e-mail.  It's people mailers.  Many of the MUAs out there put
e-mail addresses in the body when replying to (in the initial "somebody
or other wrote:" line) or forwarding an e-mail.  Automatic munging of
the archive would take care of these that the user who sent the mail
might or not be able to control or change on her own.

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.

Mike

-- 
Mike Broome
mbroome at employees dot org