Re: [AD] e-mail addresses

["Chris La Mantia" <celamantia@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Do you  really get that much spam from the contributors list?  Searching for
my own E-mail address on Altavista, the only place it appears is the
contributors list.  My inbox has 3586 messages in it (yes, I need to clean
them out) dating back to April of this year.  Of those 3586, I can identify
12 that are spam from harvesters (as opposed to spam from places where I
bought something and now they'll never stop sending me mail).  Yes, that is
12 too many, but it is hardly a flood... Even those 12 may not be directly
from the contributors list, as my E-mail address appears in 26 Usenet
messages archived on Google.

Your address, on the other hand, also appears on Quake sites and Linux
kernel mailing lists, and 42 times on Usenet.  I doubt that spam-proofing
the names on the Allegro contributors list will really change much,
especially since the addresses, once harvested, will live for years on
mailing list CD-ROMs.

--Chris

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jason Wilkins" <fenix@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: <conductors@xxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2001 10:59 AM
Subject: [AD] e-mail addresses


> I think that someone (probably not me, sorry) should go through Allegro
> and make all the e-mail addresses spam proof.  I did a search for my
> e-mail address on the web, and one of the places it turned up was as a
> contributor to Allegro.
>
> As long as the contributor list was not posted on the web, it would be
> fine to leave the address in plan form, but since it has been posted, I
> think we should make encode it.
>
> I would like it to appear as:
>
> fenix at io dot com
>
> And if you really want to put it into documents where you can click it,
> then I have some Java script I can dig up that obscures the e-mail address
> until a Java enabled client encodes it (I think its unlikely that any
> e-mail collecting spider is going to run the Java script and decode the
> e-mail address).
>
> There are three different sources of my e-mail address on the web, which
> cause me to get an incredible amount of spam.
>
> 1) I created a patch for Quake 1 which added motion and keyframe
> interpolation.  I was smart enough to put my e-mail on each chunk so
> people could reach me if they had a problem, but not smart enough to
> realize it would get plastered on the web.
>
> 2) Postings to mailing lists that are archived, but the archive software
> is too dumb to encode the e-mail addresses against collectors.
>
> 3) People have posted the Allegro contributors list to the web with my
> e-mail.
>
> I suggest that anyone do a search for their e-mail address and see what
> you come up with.  And from there start the long task of cleaning up the
> mess.
>