Spam Issue

[Robert_Moriyama]

Can we change the email address on "End of the Line" to el_guapo_7 at yahoo dot com? I'm getting a major influx of spam emails all of a sudden; don't know if this is an issue with anyone else.

Cheers,
BHM

<br><br>The 'mailto' on that story is and always has been 'el_guapo_7@yahoo.com'. Dunno if some address-grabber picked up your real address from an earlier story that had your live address, or from somewhere else. It only takes one person with your live address and a virus or spyware program to grab your info, and once it's out there, it's out there.<br><br>MY ISP provides (and AOL, for that matter) provides pretty good spam and virus filtering. My ISP-provided quarantine is catching as many as 70 - 100 spam and/or infected messages a day (a lot of MyDoom variants showing up lately); dunno if yahoo or gmail or hotmail provide similar functions.<br><br>Robert M.

[Robert_Moriyama]

I spend a quarter of my professional occupation every day as a "Professional Nitpick".  Something here caught my eye. I'm no so sure that Robert  M. addressed Mr. Marks' real compliaint.

BH Marks was voicing concern that a "valid" email address was being posted into mailto reply fields. His actual question in his post was :

Can we change the email address on "End of the Line" to ****el_guapo_7 at yahoo dot com****?
(Emphasis mine)

This request highlights/features a standard way to make an email address "sentient readable only".   Robert M. replied,

The 'mailto' on that story is and always has been 'el_guapo_7 @yahoo.com'
(without the strategic space I just added for this post.)
See? Robert converted it *back* to a spider - findable address. Thus, Dear Editor, you may have made the problem worse. (Even if those underscores are fake, a spammer would bury 1000 email addresses in a temp batch file, "search & replace to remove all _ " and try again.

What BH Marks is asking is, can/should we make mailto addresses "wordy". I don't know what the editors actually feel for policy here - I wanted to clarify what I believe the question is.

TaoPhoenix At Yahoo Dot Com

<br><br>It never occurred to me that BH might have wanted an 'pseudoaddress' that a human could figure out but a bot (a stupid bot, anyway) couldn't. I figured that the elguapo address was a dummy specifically set up to capture spam. BH? Any comments?<br><br>Robert M.

[Robert_Moriyama]

Plus, every time I look at the thread title, I keep thinking "Aphelion's Spam Issue! August 2006, everyone write a SF story about Canned Hormel Meat Product (Keeps Soldiers Healthy.)

There. I have confessed. Now we can go back to quality stories, like this Month's Animal Cruelty.

--Tao "Broke 200" Phoenix

<br><br>Let's see -- "It Came From the Back of the Cupboard", a.k.a. "The Crawling Meat Product"; "I Digested A Monster From Outer Space"; "Little Pantry of Horrors" ... I could go on, but it would be in bad TASTE.<br><br>Robert "These are NOT serious suggestions!" M.<br><br>PS Is the "Broke 200" the inverse of the "50 Richest"?