Re: [Asrg] request for review for a non FUSSP proposal

[Rich Kulawiec <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 04:18:43PM +0100, Ian Eiloart wrote:
> Still, we're already in a position where people are fearful of publishing 
> email addresses, so this spec might alleviate that problem. But, it isn't 
> fundamental to combatting spam.

You're correct that we're in that position: we see it everywhere,
from Google's needlessly-obfuscated Usenet archives (like spammers
don't have their own NNTP feeds and haven't already harvested all email
addresses long before Google publishes them) or the presence of
address-obfuscation code in mail archivers (e.g., even the notes
on the newest/development version of Mailman talk about the need
for such obfuscation).

And I _think_ we're in concurrence that it's a pointless waste of
code and effort: spammers either have or will have soon any address
that's actually used.  (And will successfully guess at many that exist
but aren't used.)

The meta-problem we face is that "cargo cult" mentality that persists
in the belief that it's possible to hide addresses from spammers.  I've
found it quite difficult to dislodge, and -- as I commented elsewhere --
am often by the irony that the people prattling the loudest about it
are running Windows on their desktop/laptop are thus stand a reasonable
chance of being the primary vector by which their address(es) is/are
harvested by spammers.

---Rsk