I recently subscribed to the computer-go mailing list, and I'd really like
to join some of the discussions, but I noticed that on the archives (
http://computer-go.org/pipermail/computer-go/) only simple email obfuscation
is used. For example "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" would appear as "johndoe at
yahoo.com".
I am afraid to post to the list, because this kind of obfuscation supposedly
makes it even easier for spammers to find my email address online. You
cannot search for the character @ on google, but if you search for "* at
*.com" you get millions of results. And more specifically if you perform the
following search: "site:http://computer-go.org/pipermail/computer-go/ * at
*.com" then you get a lot of the email addresses of people who post to the
computer go list. Also please see the following article on this subject:
http://typewriting.org/2006/06/19/Email_Obfuscation_Helps_Spammers/
Like many of the respondents, I use gmail and it nicely filters spam,
but (1) not everyone uses an email service with such good filtering
and (2) no filter is perfect, so the more the spam you get, the more
some of it will show up in your inbox, and the more time you must
spend looking at the filtered spam to verify there is no real email
accidentally filtered out.
The address "obfuscation" of this mailing list software is laughably
lame. For lists like this, I feel compelled to create a separate
email address, so that if it does get harvested by spammers and starts
being a problem, I can abandon it in the worst case.
So I agree with the author quoted above. (Besides the spamming issue,
some people might have some other privacy concerns as well.) I don't
like that this mailing list software makes the email addresses so
publicly visible. I'd rather they not be shown. (Anyone who wants to
publish their address in a mailing list can always explicitly do so in
their messages.)
cheers,
russ
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