Slashdot Mirror
Is E-Mail Obscuration Worth It?
ThenAgain asks: "Many sites obscure e-mail addresses by adding noise (like 'STOPSPAM') or by translating the punctuation into words (Ex: 'me at domain dot com'). This makes users feel good but does it actually help? Ten lines of perl could defeat any of the present schemes with ease and the spammers have shown plenty of adaptability. So if we're not helping hold back the flood of spam, why are we decreasing the utility of the web by eliminating mailto tags and forcing users to hand-correct the addresses in their mail clients?"
What I usually do is, whenever possible, to put who I'm giving my email address to as the initial part of the email address, ie. slashdot@davidcole.net so I will at least know who the jerk is who sold my address.
Otherwise, I use a hotmail account to commonly give out. Obfuscated email addresses are obnoxious.
David Cole
www.davidcole.net
For me at the moment, Bayesian filters, a technical solution, works best. Yes, it still wastes bandwidth. But if my ISP ran good filters for me (POPFile is adapting itself for this usage), my bandwidth at least could be saved. And the filters do work well.
Technical solutions are a stopgap measure, but the next step is legal and architectural. Make spamming illegal. This would only affect countries that care and spammers who get caught, but the next step will help. Make it harder to hide where you're coming from. This gives even ISPs in lawless countries motivation to stop sending spam, because if their upstream knows its them, they can threaten to disconnect them.
Munging is probably the worst solution, similar to getting an unlisted number. It's even shorter-term than filters, but it sacrifices the medium in the process. It's a bit like not answering the phone during mealtime - yes, it works, but it interferes too much with legitimate communication. If that's your choice, fine, but I think its ill-advised.
Litigious bastards
"unless I'm looking for one of those precious "email validation" messages."
A bit off topic but I found a cool site that handles those email validation messages you need to get once in awhile. It's called mailinator. Anytime you want to register with a site that asks for your email address so they can send you a validation code (and inevitably spam you to death) you can use mailinator's service for free. All you have to do is write bobs_your_uncle@mailinator.com and then you can login into that account at mailinator. All messages received there get deleted in a few minutes and do note that anyone else can access it as well, but it certainly is a good service to handle for that exact case you mention!
-Pat