Re: spam mail fodder from public mailing lists

["Joseph S. Myers" <jsm28 at cam dot ac dot uk>]

On Thu, 24 Apr 2003, Gray Watson wrote:

> I think it irresponsible in this day in age to provide fodder for the
> spammers and I encourage you to remove them ASAP.  I'm not talking
> about changing "foo at bar dot com" into "foo at bar dot com" which is
> trivial to decode.

Whereas I think the existing munging started going too far when it started 
munging message bodies as well as headers, and thereby started affecting 
the readability of patches in the list archives by messing up Texinfo in 
patches (e.g. <http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2003-04/msg01353.html>).
Although at least there is the "Raw text" option to get uncorrupted 
message bodies - there are some list archives that completely remove what 
they think are email addresses and provide no apparent mechanism to see 
what the corrupted patch actually said.  Since there is experimental 
evidence that spammers cannot even decode HTML entities in email 
addresses, could we turn off all visible munging of bodies and use HTML 
entities - invisible to readers using browsers - for any place where 
concealment from spammers is considered appropriate?

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
jsm28 at cam dot ac dot uk