FireRight on mon 28 jan 02
Further to: Robin Hopper e-mail/Privacy
For what it's worth (from a Web developer) ...
Email addresses loose their "privacy" whenever posted to any public
place on the Web, including one's personal Web site.
Bulk mailers, or those who sell lists to bulk mailers, use
"SpamBots" to constant crawl the Web looking for email addresses to harvest.
Even posts to closed opt-in lists such as this one are often not safe from
these crawlers. It's my understanding that every message posted to this list
winds up in a publically-accessible digest in HTML form ... a veritable
treasure trove for SpamBots!
Everyone is disgusted with the volume of untargeted and unsolicited
advertising that comes in the form of email, but this has become simple fact
of life on the Internet. Making a big fuss and getting one's blood pressure
up over it is an exercise in futility and self abuse.
If you wish to post your email address on your web site without
making it fair game for SpamBots, using HTML entities can help. "@" is
the code for the "@" sign and "." is the code for the "." ... for
example, I'd code my email address as ...
genwar@fireright.com
Browsers will understand this to mean "genwar@fireright.com" and
will show it as such. At this point, only the most aggressive and intrusive
SpamBots are smart enough to recognize this for what it is and convert it to
a vaild email address. Others are too dumb, get the message so won't bother,
or just don't bother since there's no shortage of
When writing to others or posting to USENET or other lists, I could
mung any email addresses appearing in the message by doing something like
this ...
genwar@fireright.invalid
genwar(AT)fireright(DOT)com
genwar@fireright.com.com
Users clicking on "Reply to Sender" will have their message bounced
back, but most are astute enough to figure out why if they're really
interested in making contact. (Opt-in lists usually require a known email
address in the "from" field, but entering the munged version in your email
client's "Reply Address" field might help in those cases where the list
agent uses that field when broadcasting messages .)
-=gw=-
| |
|
