email and s p a m blocking

[Brendan McKay]

Yes, some munging is good.  However "=OEIS=" looks a bit
too much like accidental quoted-printable text.  I suggest
lbj-AT-whitehouse-DOT-com or lbj#whitehouse,com.

Some people expressed concern that the pattern should not
be too easily decoded.  This doesn't matter.  Spammers deal
with hundreds of thousands, or millions, of addresses and
aren't going to bother with unmunging a few hundred of them.
Spammers are also not stupid and know that the small percentage
of people who munge their addresses are hostile to spam and thus
less likely to buy anything.  In other words, all the munging
has to achieve is to foil the dumb programs which run around
the web looking for email addresses.  However, don't use a
"standard" munging algorithm in case the program knows it.

Brendan.

* N. J. A. Sloane <njas at research.att.com> [021106 02:32]:
> 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