Re: Email Extractoer
Fabrice Scemama (fabrice.scemama@gesnet.net)
Tue, 07 Jul 1998 00:45:04 +0200
At 11:53 AM 7/6/98 -0700, Walter Ian Kaye wrote:
>Oooh, an evil spammer in the making. Shall we kill him now or later?
>By using a search engine you may claim you are targeting, but UCE is
>UCE, targeted or not. Don't do it. Ever. Stop thinking about this!
>
>This is timely, though, as I just wrote a spam-prevention and privacy
>device in Perl -- it hides email addresses from web pages. It's done
>and working; I'm just writing up the documentation before releasing it.
>Actually, I'm trying to write a Unix installer. Does anyone have a good
>way of getting the time zone as +/-hhmm? I found the Unix 'date' command
>will let me get "PDT" (for example), but I'd really like to get "-0700"
>and "-0800"...
All right, people, I did not choose the same method in order to convince
him not to do what most of us seem to suspect he's going to do with the
tool he's developing. So, let me suggest a humble solution. What
about replacing the <A HREF="mailto:xxx@xxx.xxx"> expression
by something like <A HREF="xxx.cgi"> where xxx.cgi is this 2-line script :
#!/usr/bin/perl
print "Location: mailto:xxx\@xxx.xxx\n\n";
But thinking about a secret algorithm to protect our mailboxes from
spam is a good idea. One method might be to search every incoming
mail for spam style. If we see forms in a mail (with lots of _____), or
lots of words like '$' or 'money', or URLs with TCP/IPs rather than
domain names, or words like 'sex', 'hot', etc., well, I guess we might
consider not reading the mail. Releasing public lists of domain names
used by spammers might be acceptable too.
But I'm not sure spam is such a problem that it deserves we lose so
much time with it.
Regards
Fabrice Scemama