All posts in the topic Obscuring email further, what about private replies (Short link)
Summary
- There are 3 posts — by 3 authors — in this topic.
- Latest post made by Richard Waid at 2007 Oct 09 22:22 UTC
Just a quick placeholder thought ... e-mails contained in the body of the
message should be further obscured to drop the final .Com, etc. It would be
worth a test to put out some unique addresses in message view to see if they
get harvested.
On an opposite track, I wonder if we should rethink private reply options from
GS. E-mail users have this ability, but web users don't. Seems like an
unintended inequality. Google groups allows private replies. This would need to
be an option to allow per site I suppose with serious volume limits and
liability/privacy cautions (like not keeping copies of private messages sent
and allowing users to cc: themselves so it is nothing different than sending an
e-mail from their own account to the recipent).
Like captcha, I imagine that any method to hinder email-address
harvesters will hinder people more than computers.
The inability of web-only users to reply privately to a post is a known
issue. As most posts are made using email, rather than the Web, I
imagine that it will be quite some time before this issue is resolved.
Unless someone can find the resources to tackle the problem ☺
On Fri, 2007-09-28 at 07:26 -0500, Steven Clift wrote:
> Just a quick placeholder thought ... e-mails contained in the body of
> the message should be further obscured to drop the final .Com, etc. It
> would be worth a test to put out some unique addresses in message view
> to see if they get harvested.
I can see what you're trying to achieve ... I just wonder if it's almost
pointless these days. Spammers try anything -- the most common attempts
we see these days are totally random firing of emails at a given domain,
running through a list of common names and combinations. It's just
totally ridiculous the lengths these anti-social prats go to in order to
send out their rubbish. Obviously the spammers can get an account and
harvest email addresses from the emails they receive if they really
wanted to.
I'm not suggesting that it's a bad idea, I don't think it is (I would
probably go further and drop the whole domain name).
> On an opposite track, I wonder if we should rethink private reply
> options from GS. E-mail users have this ability, but web users don't.
> Seems like an unintended inequality. Google groups allows private
> replies. This would need to be an option to allow per site I suppose
> with serious volume limits and liability/privacy cautions (like not
> keeping copies of private messages sent and allowing users to cc:
> themselves so it is nothing different than sending an e-mail from
> their own account to the recipent).
Not a bad idea. How frequently do you think it would be used? I'm not
sure it's a case of 'rethinking' it ... I don't think it has ever been
considered. I can't see any privacy issues with this, since it is
possible from email anyway (as you say).