Re: Obfuscating email

From:

=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Arne_Vajh=F8j?= <arne@vajhoej.dk>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.java.programmer

Date:

Sat, 17 May 2008 18:47:22 -0400

Message-ID:

<482f6079$0$90265$14726298@news.sunsite.dk>

Mark Space wrote:

I was just looking at one of the quotation lines from this newsgroup:

Andrea Francia
<andrea.francia@REMOVE-FROM-HERE.ohoihihoihoih.TO-HERE.gmx.it> writes:

It seems obfuscating email addresses is very popular and with the amount
of spam I get I can see why.

I wonder if there's some better way. I suppose this would be some form
of white list with a trusted authority. Andrea for example registers
his true email address with AuthorityX, which then relays email for him.
AuthorityX doesn't allow non-trusted domains to it send email in the
first place.

There's been some talk recently about transforming social sites, which
are currently wide open, to something more restricted, so that users can
control their information and have security.

I don't know, would anyone use such a service?

Pretend our reference implementation will be implemented in Java, for
relevance to this newsgroup.

I don't think it is worth it.

You will send email to someone that gets malware on his/her computer
and it will steal all the email addresses in the saved emails.

Use a mail host with a spam filter and an email client also with
a spam filter.

Then you will use 10-60 seconds per week deleting the few spam
emails that comes through both.

You will spend more time explaining how your obfuscated email address
should be deobfuscated than that.

Arne