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RE: Listserver and SPAM

To: Alex & Peggy McGregor <apmcgregor@home.com>
Subject: RE: Listserver and SPAM
From: Jarrid Gross <JGross@econolite.com>
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 08:44:40 -0700
Alex wrote,

>If you (we) can alter them to something spammers can't directly use then
>why can't an intelligent spammer alter them back?  I hate the stuff as
>much as anyone but if we alter our addresses so that the a-h's can't use
>them then how can legit people do so (if they don't know the
>conversion)?


Well for one, mail bots are software programs that looks for email
addresses.
There are a lot of them (e-addresses) on the net, and mail bots dont eed to
be very smart to find many addresses.
A mail bot could be configured to look for common email obfuscation methods
and create a valid address from the result.
A smarter email obfuscation method would keep even these machines at bay.
Example:
        joe@bmi.com becomes joe(@0001@)bmi.com
        jill@tta.com becomes jill(@0002@)tta.com

so on and so forth.

Your average joe would be able to figure out how to reassemble obfuscated
email addressed while the mail bot would require real human intervention.
Spammer email harvesters dont have that level of discipline (yet).

Hopefully with time, legislation (yeah I said it) will counter this form
of theft.


NOLIST

Jarrid Gross

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