Re: OT: Futility of munged addresses

In article <g6n9g2$60s$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, tony_proctor says...


Were you thinking of anyone in particular Don (e.g. trying to reach someone
yourself) or is this a general observation?

I fall into the "munged" category you mention, along with others. I feel
that any human being can infer my real email address by observing the munged
one, and I have received several direct emails from people so it does seem
to work. I do agree with your sentiment about totally invalid email
addresses but you're covering a wider scope than that

As a software professional, I know how easy it is for a "web crawler" to
spot email addresses (e.g. some munged ones) and stash them away. This does
still happen, even though sending bulk emails gets more and more difficult,
and it's fairly easy to demonstrate.

Tony Proctor

I used to do similar to this, using a valis address with the addition of
"...spam..., etc." and, since I have full control of my server, I can
see all the mails flagged as spam that would have been rejected. I did
get several that removed the spam word or special characters and just as
many that didn't. Of all these, my mail server trapped as many spam
mails in each category. What was possibly worse, is the use of the part
after the "@" to send mails, so they appear to come from you. You then
get all the bounce messages...

The best I've found is the one I now use, an invalid domain, since it
doesn't even get sent on the Internet, generating unneccesary traffic.
However, it only takes one "clever" person to decode it and post it in
the live, to need a change to what is only a special mailbox alias for
Newsgroups anyway.

As for the OP's comments, I have many clients who pick their own ISP. Of
these, BTinternet are often complained about as trapping non-spam mails
and so not delivering them. Tiscali and Yahoo are others falling in this
category. The advice I give is to choose a service provider that is
preferably not one of the big consumer ISPs. If they prefer to use one
of these, than I suggest they select a better mail service provider, one
that can be used with any ISP, to simplify future ISP migration.

The mail system used should be one that allows you to supervise your own
incoming mail after the server has done its attempt at flagging possible
spam. Preferably one using a learning spam engine, that doesn't just
rely on Spamhaus or similar. With this, you can check for good mails
filtered as spam and inform it of its mistake.

In summary, the email address harvester programs will eventually get
around whatever munging method you use and send spam either to you or
appearing to come from you. Leaving your address unencoded will only
make this process quicker. Filtering your incoming spam is relatively
trivial these days but having your account removed for appearing to be
the source of spam is more off a problem - especially if you are trying
to "discuss" it with an Indian call center, as used by BTinternet, for
example...

--
John W
To mail me replace the obvious with co.uk twice
.

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