[vox] Reducing spams for us...

[Mark K. Kim]

On Thu, 25 Sep 2003, Jeremy Turner wrote:

> Do you have a separate account or alias for tracking what sources give
> you spam?

Yes.  My "normal" account is spam-free even after about 3 years of use.  I
keep a very tight control over it.

My mailing list ones are receiving some spam, mostly from LUGOD, but it's
still at a tolerable level.

> I think it was on Yahoo Groups that they strip everything after the @
> sign when displaying the message on a web page.  That would be a good
> feature if pipermail(?) or other mail archiving programs did that.  Or
> if they html escaped all email addresses. :-)

Yeah... we discussed doing that a while ago but settled on doing it only
in the message headers.  Changing message bodies can be dangerous.  I'm
actually all for it, though, as long as we can pick out the e-mail
addresses correctly from the body.  The "Mastering Regular Expressions"
book's appendix B has a regex that does exactly that (it's almost a
page-long) if Bill or someone wants to implement it.

> Looking back through my archives of this list (randomly picking out
> replies), I didn't see any inclusion of email addresses in reply lines.
> Could you cite which ones are problematic?  Maybe it's only one or two
> clients.

Going through the archive, it doesn't appear to be tied to any specific
client.  It seems to happen if anyone posts to the mailing list only with
the e-mail address, but not their name.  Then when you reply to that
person, the mail reader uses the e-mail address instead of the person's
name since the "From:" line has no name but only the e-mail address.

So anyone who wants to reduce spams, put your name on your "From:" line!

-Mark "this was surprisingly enlightening" Kim

-- 
Mark K. Kim
http://www.cbreak.org/
PGP key available on the website
PGP key fingerprint: 7324 BACA 53AD E504 A76E  5167 6822 94F0 F298 5DCE