From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Wed Jul 16 2003 - 05:18:45 MDT
On Wed, Jul 16, 2003 at 03:57:17AM -0700, Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
>
> On Wed, 16 Jul 2003, Anders Sandberg wrote:
>
> > Yes, but that would only solve the problem of changing email addresses.
> > One major cause of spam is spambots trawling the net for email
> > addresses, so giving them the new one would be a mistake
> > (http://www.cdt.org/speech/spam/030319spamreport.pdf). It has to be
> > properly mungled, preferably without confusing people too much.
>
> The best solution I think I've seen for this "thus far" is
> to mangle the address with an image within it. For example
> making the "@" a gif generally fools the address harvesting
> bots but still allows humans to get the message.
The URL included above also has a HTML-based scheme using characters
(writing e for 'e'), which has the benefit that cut and paste still
works.
> This does however tend to make nonfunctional one of the more useful
> features of the HTML protocol (i.e. the "mailto:" capability).
I don't know; using mailto:e&#... seems to produce correct email
addresses. But if this practice gets widespread the spammers will of
course adapt, and we must then use a nonstandard way.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 16 2003 - 05:24:01 MDT