email and s p a m blocking

[Rick Shepherd]

Hello all,

Yes, there are several advantages to Brian's suggestion below....
Instead of an individual having his/her email address in potentially
hundreds or thousands of places (say once per sequence as I guess
is being done now), the actual email address would only need to be
in one place.  If an email address changes later (as is almost inevitable
for a lot of us), there is much less work to do to update the address
and prevent some emails from going to old, dead addresses.

(Some people may have "pobox" or other email addresses that are
already intended to help with such transparent transitions from one
email provider to another -- but I'm sure that most don't.  Although
aware of such services for years, I've never bothered to use them.).

Incorporating a previous wish mentioned by someone on this list...
If also someone wishes to be informed whenever a sequence for
which he/she is a contributor is later updated or corrected, this
email page could display a prompt to that effect.  At the risk of
making this overcomplicated, one could even register/log in and
maintain one's own profile/settings/email address/notification flag(s)
(hopefully with checks to prevent accidental or intentional abuse).

One other thought:  A recent computer programming contest I
entered (alas, too late for a good showing) required membership
in a Yahoo group first:  I noticed that Yahoo groups truncate
email addresses in displays (to help prevent spam-related problems)
but I'm not sure they hide enough that the rest couldn't be guessed in
many cases.

Rick Shepherd

----- Original Message -----
From: "Brian L. Galebach" <briang at SEGmail.com>
To: <njas at research.att.com>; <seqfan at ext.jussieu.fr>
Sent: Tuesday, November 05, 2002 2:27 PM
Subject: RE: email and s p a m blocking


> How about this:
>
> Perhaps instead of showing an email address, the site could have, for each
> contributer, a link to a "send email" page where a person could compose an
> email, and hit send.  The sending user would not see the recipient's email
> address.  The site, which knows the email address, would then send the
> email.  If two people are interested in further communication, they can
> always exchange email addresses through use of this "email" page.
>
> Sincerely,
> Brian Galebach
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: N. J. A. Sloane [mailto:njas at research.att.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, November 05, 2002 11:17 AM
> To: seqfan at ext.jussieu.fr
> Cc: njas at research.att.com
> Subject: email and s p a m blocking
>
>
> Dear Seqfans
>
> What should we do about posting email addresses in the OEIS ?
>
> On the one hand it is important to post addresses so that
> people can get in touch with each other about sequences
>
> On the other hand there are programs that search the web
> for email addresses and sell them to spammers
>
> One possible solution would be to modify email addresses in an obvious way
>
> For example, change   lbj at whitehouse.com  to  lbj=OEIS=whitehouse.com
>
> in other words, replace "@" in every email address by "=OEIS="
>
> Does anyone have a better idea?
>
> Neil Sloane