[seqfan] Re: Spammers And The EIS

[Maximilian Hasler]

> Conclusion: Spammers are not fooled by those "(AT)"'s in our email addresses on the EIS.

That's obvious !
They have here a "gold mine" of hundreds of valid addresses which they
can download via one single file ("recent" or as much as they want
from "all") and transform into a list of plain text  emails by a
simple "sed" command.

> If it is necessary that authors' email addresses appear on the EIS, then I suggest that they be better hidden from spam-bots.

I agree.
The best would be to allow for creation of user accounts, with the
additional benefit of being able to allow authenticated users access
more functionalities or customization of display format (e.g. # of
search results per page, etc).
Then users who chose to create such an account can be contacted via an
online form which does not reveal the name. Many open source CMS
(drupal,...) offer such functionality "out of the box".

Actually it would be sufficient that Neil maintained a list of "Full
Name  <e-mail>" correspondence
which would allow to send a message to the author via a simple web
form, as  above.

Another solution would be to require a very simple anti-spam question
to be answered (simple mathematical operation or "what's the colour of
this text" with a multiple choice form) in order to reveal the e-mail
address.

> Maybe email addresses should be displayed as graphics, possibly.
> (Surely it should be easy to automatically generate a graphic that represents an email address.)

I think even that is easy to crack for those who make it their
business to harvest e-mail addresses.
But indeed it would be better than nothing.

Maximilian