Home Original page

Off-topic: hiding your email address

Off-topic: hiding your email address - don't bother...

Peter Hansen peter at engcorp.com
Sun Sep 30 03:29:33 EDT 2001 
chris liechti wrote:
> 
> i immediatly removed my nospam string in the address. it's not helping
> anyway:

I'm curious how much it might help.  I have used no hiding techniques
and within a few minutes after *every* posting (possibly with the 
odd exception, but I don't think so) I get a single spam message from
some random account.  Later on I get others.  Does this happen to others?
What about those with various forms of "nospam"?

> some spammers are surely clever enough to detect such fake emails and they
> may even correct it. (removing spaces, replacing 'at'=='@', remove strings
> like 'no.spam' etc. isn't a big thing, is it?)
> and anyone here knows that writing a python programm that collects and
> checks email addresses from a newserver would be a matter of minutes as
> everything is provided by the standard library (nntplib, re and string
> modules) [hope no one gets on bad ideas!?!]

I was thinking of that recently too.  There are certainly *some* creative
signatures which are effectively unparsable, except by coding for those
very specific patterns (and the effort wouldn't be worth it to a spammer).
Most of the methods of seen would be very easily defeated by an 
easily written Python utility.  I even thought of writing one just to
remove the crap so I could more easily reply to people, but gave it up
before starting. :)

-- 
----------------------
Peter Hansen, P.Eng.
peter at engcorp.com
More information about the Python-list mailing list