[Elecraft] Re: Spam alert

[Larry Mollica]

Not to quibble (well ok, I am), but I don't get why there is an 
assumption the spambots are dumber than the search engines.

I can do a google search on my address and get hits in the elecraft 
archives, in spite of the escaping of "@". Why would spambot software 
have trouble doing the same thing?

If I were spamming slime-scum, I would not expect my bot software to 
be fooled by html escape codes. I haven't any way to know that 
spambots recognize escape codes, I just can't imagine why they 
wouldn't. Why would they ignore them? It's part of the html spec, 
yes? We're not talking rocket science (or AGC levels ;).

I've seen various recipes for further obscuring of the addresses by 
burying them in javascript. This would seem more promising as there 
could be lots of variation. But the simple %40 for @ is a no brainer, 
even *I* could write software to find that.

The web archive is why I too cooked up a "throw-away" address for use 
on this list. When the spam starts, I'll toss it and start over.

Sorry this is straying off, what I wanted to say was; if I had my 
druthers, I'd prefer to see email addresses more effectively obscured 
in the elecraft archives. But I'm guessing that would not be a 
popular notion.

Thanks
Larry



>The Elecraft archives at mailman.qth.net do the same thing as 
>Martin's searchable archive. They do not use the '@' character in 
>the email address. Instead use an escape hex code of %40, which 
>displays as an '@' when viewed in a web browser but does not decode 
>as an ascii '@' when the source is scanned by a SPAM robot. So both 
>Martin's and the mailman archives are protected from spammers (for 
>the moment ;^).
>
>73, Eric  WA6HHQ
>------