[Adium-devl] Possible solution to the spam problems

[Peter Hosey]

I just read an interesting post on the TextMate blog:

http://blog.macromates.com/2006/obfuscating-email-addresses/

> A study from 2002 says that entity-encoding the email address is  
> enough (conclusion 5) which I find rather hard to believe, which is  
> actually the sole purpose of this post, I hereby give you one piece  
> of entity-encoded email address: wrwilsq02 at sneakemail.com. I will  
> update this in a month or so, saying if it got any spam.
>
> ⋮
>
> 2006-10-16: The results are in: 286 emails received to the plain  
> text address and just 1 received to the entity-encoded address.  
> This was from a Nigerian scammer, so perhaps it was manual,  
> although none of my contact addresses have received such email.
>
> ⋮
>
> Let me end this post with a general advice: when you start your  
> business do not pick logical addresses such as sales, feedback,  
> support, and similar. These will get spam, no matter how well you  
> obfuscate them.
>
> I personally use tm-sales, tm-feedback, tm-support, etc. which  
> currently do not get any spam at all.

Perhaps we should change our feedback address to “adium-feedback”.

Of course, we'll need to keep feedback@ around until at least our  
abandonment of Tiger, if not Leopard, which means that this plan can  
wait until then: we begin the changeover when the next cat is  
announced, and we drop the plain old feedback@ when we drop Tiger  
(maybe even later than that—maybe when we drop Leopard).

(Also: Don't **ever** state any complete email address in plain text— 
not feedback, not devl, not any other. Mailing list mails are web- 
accessible, and even a private message may end up quoted publicly by  
its recipient. Eventually, that whole plain-text email address will  
end up on the web, and be harvested by a spammer's spider.)

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: PGP.sig
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 186 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://adium.im/pipermail/devel_adium.im/attachments/20080224/4c865247/attachment.sig>