[tlug] Email address munging in the TLUG archives

["Josh Glover" <jmglov@example.com>]

On 04/12/06, Jim <jep200404@example.com> wrote:

> "Stephen J. Turnbull" wrote:
>
> > Jim writes:
> >
> >  > I hope the munging will thwart automated harvesting of email addresses,
> >  > but would decipherable by real person trying to reach the author.
> >
> > Too late.  Spam haruvas have long since surpassed the ability of
> > Windows users to decipher anything textual.

Steve, WTF? No C&C warning? ;)

And also, WTF? You did not start a new thread? I did not want the
voting thread polluted, even with good ideas and commentary. :)

> It could be an image of text (like the password is presently shown),
> possibly mogrified with warping and camouflage to confuse OCR.

This is not a terrible idea. I will research our archiving scripts to
see how easy this would be to do.

> Among textual techniques, simple ones, like rot1,
> so that .com appears as .dpn.

I rather imagine that current spam haruva tech can defeat this, and
it is much harder for a real person to figure out, if that is what we
want.

Let me describe how the munging works now:

1. The last two digits of the email address in the message data (i.e.
both headers and body) are replaced with question marks, e.g. your
address becomes: Jim <jep200404@example.com>

We basically need to decide if we want people to be able to decipher
email addresses or not. If so, I like your idea or a Javascript text
hack. If not, I think we should simply replace everything in the
address after the @ sign, e.g. your address becomes: Jim
<jep200404@example.com>

-Josh