On Wed, Oct 26, 2011 at 04:39:56AM -0700, John Green wrote:
>
>
> Hi,
> A better way might be to add a constant to all the addresses. Such as,
> in the case of Eric, "Eric" 123ewdysar@whatever.com The "123" is added
> to all addresses, and removed manually before sending emails. This might
> also have the benefit of filling the spammers mailbox with returned
> messages.
Unfortunately, it would also add an annoyance factor to using this
group. Since spammers continue to evolve new attack methods, such
annoyances would be additive and would soon make the group unusable.
This is essentially what happened to USENET with regard to trolls.
> Another method I use is to have a space at either side of the "@" in the
> email addresses, so that automated 'spiders' cannot read it, as they are
> probably searching for any @ sign and close adjacent text.
That worked, for a short bit, about 10 years back. A somewhat more
sophisticated technique that I (and others) had worked out
(entity-encoding for email addresses) worked for quite a bit longer than
that, but is also useless these days.
The thing to understand here is that spamming is a profitable business
(e.g., see "Spamford" in Wikipedia.) Those folks are hiring very bright
people, and the bots that they're sending out are quite sophisticated.
Simple tricks like replacing the '@' sign are long dead.
The right answer is to either use a commercial email provider who does
what is called "SMTP-time validation" and effective client-side
filtering - or to become an expert and run your own mail server. Fairly
obvious choice for most people. :)
--
Ben Okopnik
-=-=-=-=-=-
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