From: Kent Landfield (kent@landfield.com)
Date: Wed Mar 14 2001 - 16:11:35 CST
stanley@peak.org writes:
# Charles Lindsey <chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk> writes:
#
# >> measures, will not solve these problems, but the absence of
# >> ".invalid" in an invalid address may provide some indication of
# >> malicious intent.
#
# >I'm confused by this paragraph. I think I disagree with what it's saying
# >both coming and going. Using .invalid and a munged address *does*
# >effectively prevent automated harvesting of the addresses, and not using
# >".invalid" seems unlikely to be evidence of *malicious* intent
# >necessarily.
#
# It does not prevent harvesting, it prevents spam from appearing in the
# poster's mailbox. It also consumes the spammers disk and time. This is a
# win-win for everyone of any significance.
I find this whole thing silly. How dumb do you think the authors of
harvesting software are ? They are very aware that these types of tricks
are going on. So now we are going to document a means that they can code
to in order to harvest the names. I have always found the argument that
it prevents spam a bit confused. Harvesting and reselling email addresses
is a business that the slimey elements participate in. They have automated
tools that spider and harvest email addresses. This is an automated process,
not one done by hand. If you added invalid to get kent@landfield.com.invalid
the only thing you are really accomplishing is that you are stoping the
readership from being able to reply to a poster directly. That is unless
you expect newreaders to be modified to automatically strip the .invalid.
If so then whats the point ? The only thing you have accomplished is that
wasted bits end up in massive numbers of news articles globally and consume
excess space on everyone's systems. Harvesters simply add the check for
.invalid to the table used to harvest the address and convert it to something
they can include in their "product". Spammers use these lists to do the actual
spamming. I'm finding that they are rarely the same people anymore...
-- Kent Landfield Phone: 1-817-545-2502 Email: kent@landfield.com http://www.landfield.com/ Search the Usenet FAQ Archive at http://www.faqs.org/faqs/ Search the RFC/FYI/STD/BCP Archive at http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/