On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 04:18:43PM +0100, Ian Eiloart wrote:
Still, we're already in a position where people are fearful of publishing
email addresses, so this spec might alleviate that problem. But, it isn't
fundamental to combatting spam.
You're correct that we're in that position: we see it everywhere,
from Google's needlessly-obfuscated Usenet archives (like spammers
don't have their own NNTP feeds and haven't already harvested all email
addresses long before Google publishes them) or the presence of
address-obfuscation code in mail archivers (e.g., even the notes
on the newest/development version of Mailman talk about the need
for such obfuscation).
And I _think_ we're in concurrence that it's a pointless waste of
code and effort: spammers either have or will have soon any address
that's actually used. (And will successfully guess at many that exist
but aren't used.)
The meta-problem we face is that "cargo cult" mentality that persists
in the belief that it's possible to hide addresses from spammers. I've
found it quite difficult to dislodge, and -- as I commented elsewhere --
am often by the irony that the people prattling the loudest about it
are running Windows on their desktop/laptop are thus stand a reasonable
chance of being the primary vector by which their address(es) is/are
harvested by spammers.
---Rsk
_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
Asrg(_at_)irtf(_dot_)org
http://www.irtf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg