email and s p a m blocking

[Olivier Gerard]

I agree with Brendan,
anything that fools standard pattern grabbing programs
is already a good step.  Putting spaces, changing
the @ and the . with other characters such as #,!,%,$,;,:
having special meaning can do the job.

The main concern is on the recent additions and the full listing 
of the table.  For the individual lookup, especially
in enhanced format, one can use clever splitting with the
html tags so that the rendering is readable but the 
html source difficult to parse.

But remember that the OEIS has already been scanned by
spammers. It will help block future address harvesting
but will not stop people using addresses from old lists.
I still receive spam sent to an old domain name I used
only with a site now extinct for four years, and for
which a Google search gives nothing...

Another, more personal step, that OEIS authors can take
is to use an expandable email address when signing their
contributions. If you have a domain name, you can define
an alias pointing to one of your real mailboxes.  When
you start receiving spam trough this alias, you just
create another one and redirect/filter/discontinue the
old one.

People on the list interested by having an alias @seqfan.net
redirecting to their real mailbox can contact me directly.
I will be happy to setup this for them.
I have decided, up to now, to stay with my academic address
on the OEIS, because it is fitting for this circumstance
but I may change in the future.


Le 06, Brendan McKay écrivait:
> 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.
>