# [Maybe this thread gets really off-topic - should we move it
# somewhere else? -- Matthias]
No, I think it is a very valid topic. It is one that anyone posting to
the net needs to think about. It is especially important to people like
faq maintainers that post to the net on a regular basis for the benefit
of the community.
# > [From:-line Munging]
#
# Personally, I stronly oppose From:-munging -- it disrupts mail service at
# quite a few places, as do other methods, such as confirming mails through
# automated whitelist-systems. Just to illustrate: I've been the vote taker
# for some Usenet votes in the ch.*-hierarchy; about 15% of the votes had to
# be processed manually due to munged addresses and automated whitelists.
#
# IMO FAQ-maintainers should not set a precedence of surrender to spam.
I personally agree with Matthias. I feel munging makes it harder to
communicate with the readership of the individual faqs. Munging is a
sad work-around to a major wart on the net. The problem with my personal
opinion is that it does nothing to help make an faq maintainer's mailbox
contain less spam...
I may be part of the problem on faqs.org. Not any more so than any other
archive, such as rtfm.mit.ede, but a part of the problem none the less.
There are different types of email address harvesters. I have seen straight
email message harvesters that go after mail archives, usenet harvesters that
munge all inbound messages of a newsfeed and extract all user@domain formed
addresses and then there are the web page address scraper spiders.
I have all three archives here and I don't have a good idea of how to solve
the problem without affecting how legitimate users deal with the faq and its
maintainers. I could change all web references to "user at domain" and leave
the web mailto: references as the user@domain so the addresses could be
responded to. But that does nothing for the ftp archive of the mirrored faqs
from rtfm. I know I can't solve the problem on this end and up until this
point I have just punted the issue because it had not really been discussed
here. I personally use procmail and it does a reasonable job of filtering
out spam.
# > Doesn't help with the web pages of course.
#
# foo@bar.tld gives a nice foo@bar.tld
And while this works for harvesters that are stupid, it does very little
for those that have a clue. This probably will not work very effectively
as address harvester authors are getting a clue to the tricks used and
are programming around it.
I wish I had an answer for this other than filtering out spam from your
inbound mailbox...
As Matthias stated...
# IMO FAQ-maintainers should not set a precedence of surrender to spam.
-- Kent Landfield Phone: 1-817-545-2502 Email: kent@landfield.com http://www.landfield.com/ Search the Usenet FAQ Archive at http://www.faqs.org/faqs/ Search the RFC/FYI/STD/BCP Archive at http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/************************************************************* To unsubscribe send a message to majordomo@faqs.org as
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