On Sat, Feb 15, 2003 at 08:42:58PM -0800, Paul Johnson wrote: > On Sat, Feb 15, 2003 at 04:56:51PM -0800, Vineet Kumar wrote:
> > Why not use a separate (but not totally bogus) address? Does your MTA > > support address suffixes such as scruloose-debian-user or > > scruloose+debian-user? Hmm. I'll have to go wading through Exim's docs to find that out... The idea behind this is that mail to user+anything@localpart would get delivered to user@localpart, allowing me (in my role as joe user) to filter based on the suffix? > > Those are probably the easiest way to hide, and > > you don't sacrifice that ability for others to contact you off-list. If > > no such suffixes are usable, you could still just get another email > > address specifically for list subscriptions that only forwards to your > > original address. This still hides your real address without forging a > > totally bogus address. True... Though getting more addresses is likely to involve money or hassle, or both. Especially since a lot of the free mail services seem to be huge spam-magnets (thus *entirely* defeating my purpose). > It also allows you to know where folks got your address from if they > just throw it in without stripping off the plus or bang path. Gives > you another way to procmail your mail to sort it by interest instead > of munging, which is always the wrong solution. Hmm... So, let me see if I understand: I subscribe to the list with a suffixed address, so actual debian-user traffic comes through with the suffix intact. I then dev/null (or set a priority, or filter to wherever) any mail with that suffix that *doesn't* come from the list, and if anyone wants to send me a personal reply off-list, they (manually?) remove the suffix while composing. Like that? > http://www.interhack.net/pubs/munging-harmful/ > If your concern is about spam, then do the right thing and report it. > Pipe spam through spamassassin -r to mark known spam with > Razor/Cloudmark, and check the headers and report as necissary or > forward it to your spamcop account (they're free, > http://spamcop.net/). Yup, spam is my concern. After subscribing to the list, within a week I received my first spam in over six months. Okay... read that doc on munging, and it does raise good points. On the other hand, if I feel like using [EMAIL PROTECTED] as my return address in a public forum as a second-last resort (last resort being total non-participation), that seems to me like a valid choice. It's a "real" address, so it won't generate bounces... it's another free service they offer, just silently /dev/null-ing anything sent to it. I would find the "you must respect the standards" argument a lot more compelling if the standards made better provision for my privacy. A standard that doesn't do what's needed of it must evolve. And yes, if I don't succeed in keeping my address out of the hands of the spammers, I will certainly continue to "do the right thing" and use spamcop's reporting service, and if necessary I'll set up some filtering (spamassassin or that Bayesian statistical thing that was mentioned in a recent thread...) But if I can make that unnecessary (by only providing my address to people I actually want to hear from), then so much the better. Thanks for your input -Chris
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