I've had the same email address for eight years. During that time, I have never, not once, tried to obfuscate or hide it. I am, arguably, more "known" than you or the original inquisitor. Spam has never gotten to a point where I felt it necessary to ask someone, or a group of someones, to provide protection of my address in a way that requires a man-hour or more of research/programming, especially in a way that would detrimentally affect future inquisitors. I can't count the number of times I've found a question in a mailing list archive, seen no response or suitable answer archived, emailed the original quester for their update, and received the solution quickly, politely, and with far fewer headaches (signing up, lurk period, asking, waiting days, leaving). Similarly, I'm not convinced that the archiving of his address was the only probable cause - it could just as easily been a Windows friend infected with an Address Book stealing virus (this is the primary reason, as previously suggested, that people use alternate email addresses or primary+mailinglist(a)primary.com). Ofuscating email addresses is about as useful as using URL shorteners. They are detrimental and damaging to the Internet. -- Morbus Iff ( cheese and rice saves ) Technical: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/779 Culture: http://www.disobey.com/ and http://www.gamegrene.com/ icq: 2927491 / aim: akaMorbus / yahoo: morbus_iff / jabber.org: morbus

You, and everyone else, can get it by doing a whois on my domain, or by simply accessing http://disobey.com/about/. Your comparison is flawed. I don't have a cell phone, and I don't answer my real phone. Next? -- Morbus Iff ( i subscribe to the theory of intellectual osmosis ) Technical: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/779 Culture: http://www.disobey.com/ and http://www.gamegrene.com/ icq: 2927491 / aim: akaMorbus / yahoo: morbus_iff / jabber.org: morbus

Perhaps if people are obfuscating or not directly giving you their e-mail address it is because they don't want you to know what it is. Understandably, if someone doesn't want to talk to you and you want to talk to them, that can be frustrating. But that's their right. When I sign up for a commercial website, I use the + gmail operator so that I know if they sell my address. For instance, if I sign up at foobar.com<http://foobar.com>, I would use reflection+foobar@. Then when I start getting spam I know where it came from. Since this is a mailing list, it's a pain in my rear to change my displayed address everytime I want to say something to reflection+wikitech-l@, so I had to use the base address of just reflection. When you do a google search for my e-mail address, the only results are from this mailing list. (a couple others are similar, but not mine). That means that the 2-3 spam messages I get per day on this relatively new address are from this mailing list. If you go to mail.wikipedia.org <http://mail.wikipedia.org> and sign in to wikitech-l, you can access a list of Wikitech-l subscribers. A poor attempt is made here to obfuscate the addresses, using the 'at'. Most mail clients I have used automatically recognize this format and as a convenience turn the at into an @ for you. It is ridiculously easy for a harvester to do this. Even easier for them is to pluck the thousands of e-mail addresses sitting plainly in our archives. I don't want to convince anyone that plainly posting your e-mail address on the web is a bad idea. I also don't want to convince anyone that receiving spam is an unpleasant experience. Further, I don't want to explain to anyone that it is a gross and unnecessary inconvenience to manage two or more e-mail addresses simply for the purpose of reading a mailing list. The merit must go over my head in the first place. Aren't I then just going to have to filter the spam out of the other address? Yes, yes I am. On 7/17/05, Morbus Iff &lt;morbus(a)disobey.com&gt; wrote:

Know you tried to nit-pick my argument, so I will have to point out the difference in monetary cost between publishing on the internet and publishing a book. Presumably you have not tried to publish a real physical book? OK, the punchline is that it's much, much, much more flexible, cheap and easy to deliver by publishing on the internet THAT is the reason people often publish on the internet, NOT because they desire interaction. (Of course it depends on your definition of interaction as well). Oh, why do people object to the owners of a list spending a few mins making it "hard" for a spammer to syphon off all the email addresses, whilst still allowing a human to interact? There are a number of ways this can be reasonably done. Well, actually, since I do run a commercial email service I think I can help answer this question. I don't have millions of customers like Hotmail, but I do have a large enough selection that I can promise you that my customers "do not get spam". Every so often one of them starts to receive stuff and will write to complain - I can usually put their email address into google and discover the source of the leak and that the publishing of the address was within days or a week of them first getting a spam message. So I haven't seen a lot published about this, but my conclusion is that at least some spammers appear to be harvesting addresses from google rather than harvesting web pages (side bar: curious if anyone can confirm or deny this). The practical upshot is that you can happily receive zero email in this world for years and years. Generally you will start to receive large amounts of spam within days of publishing your email address somewhere that google can see it. Posting to mailing lists (and to a lesser extent these days to usenet) seems to be the fastest way to ramp up the amount of spam you will receive. I therefore claim that it's worth trying to obfuscate your email address if possible. Why hand out bricks to people smashing your windows? This is a controversial topic clearly. My take on this is that personally I am IT literate and have absolutely no problem rigging up a spam scanner which means that I very rarely ever see a spam message - I get hundreds in my spam bucket that I never read, but rarely anything in my INBOX. However, I sell email services to "real people" and very few of them can properly operate the anti-spam functions (it says "on" or "off"...), let alone rig all the code up and build their own spam filters if I hadn't provided all these functions for them. My 2p is spent trying to defend all those people who aren't computer nerds like me.... Ed W

I've got to agree with Morbus. I HATE spam, not just for the annoyance of finding it in my inbox, but even more for the way it is causing various sysadmins to enact measures which, taken to the extreme, will destroy the value of email. The tools are available to deal with it quite effectively at the recipient's end, preferably at the client, or at least at the user's mail server. Obscuring e-mail addresses isn't the answer, neither are draconian measures such as isps using blackhole lists to outright reject email from 'suspicious' sources. Filter, yes, but block no. My isp throws away email from any servers on various blackhole lists, which contain at various times the servers which forward mail from yahoo groups, or sourceforge mailing lists' etc. I've had to set up my own mail server so that I can participate in these mailing lists in such a way that I can censor them instead of my isp. No amount of explaining that they are throwing away legitimate e-mails for their clients seems to get through to many isps. And since the original poster was complaining about spam to his gmail account, he should be able to take solace in the fact that gmail seems to have the best spam filtering (not blocking) which I've seen. I've been using gmail for a year or more, and it has had an astonishingly high batting average both for correctly finding spam, but also for not marking innocent email as spam. I think that I've only had something like two incoming emails wrongly tagged as spam to my gmail account, and a similar small number of real spam getting through.