[seqfan] Re: Email addresses

[Joerg Arndt]

* Rick Shepherd <rlshepherd2 at gmail.com> [Aug 05. 2009 09:59]:
> [...]

> 
> Rick
> 
> P.S.  In the cat-and-mouse game of hiding and finding e-mail addresses, I
> believe there are probably large numbers of actual human beings collecting
> large numbers of e-mail addresses for very small wages even as we speak.

No, harvesters are (to my best knowledge) robots.
Therefore poison pages with generated (invalid)
email addresses are a good idea  8-)

Trying to hide your mail address (beyond obvious
things as in news groups) does not really help.
Any mail address used in public is found be the bots.

Changing the address (is running away from the bad guys and)
causes problems for the OEIS.

For people who are mental about their oh so secret
mail address: just create one like seqs-myname at whatever.com
and stick with it.  Just pipe all mail to that adr. to
one folder and you are fine.

Using Yahoo(!!!aargh!excl!!!) is unwise because these guys are
not on top of matters email, to say the very least.

Filtering mail is a good thing[TM], here is what I do:

Server drops connection on certain super obvious spams.
Spamassasin scores all surviving mails.
Whitelist for some clueless folks
who sent html mail and that kind of junk.
Procmail /dev/null's some spammers e.g.
(from my top secret ~/.procmailrc )
----------------
## very high score, hello USA & China:
:0:
* ^X-Spam-Score: .* \(\+\+\+\+\+\+\+\+
$DEVNULL

## some German Nazi spammer bastards, hello DDR:
:0:
* ^From: .*@reiseinfos\.aidu\.de>
$DEVNULL
----------------

Lower scored mails (above a certain threshold)
go to the may-be-spam folder.  Rest of mails is
sorted into folders.

Also some content based filtering happens, one
gotta be careful with this.

This way I receive about 3 spams a day,
95% of those are already in the may-be-spam folder.

Without this I'd receive (estimated) 300 spams a day.


> [...]

IF we really like to stick with the link-for-email
scheme (I'll belch and) these links should go to
a _dedicated_ page that (is either your genuine
"contact me" page with _no_ other fluff or)
essentially says:

--------------
I have contributed and edited some sequences in the OEIS.
If you want to contact me regarding these,
 then ... (blah, blah) ...
[link to proper contact page]
or
[you (dot) fav0ritcewl (@T) waytohide (d0t) yourbl00dyemail]
--------------

Now let's see whether this mail passes seqfan's spam filter.