[Pan-users] Re: RE: Access provider, email provider, and Pan

[Duncan]

Beartooth <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Sat, 17
Jun 2006 16:44:37 -0400:

> Actually, I was thinking of making one like "<Beartooth (at)
> adelphia.net>," only with my real address (I.e., the one I mostly use)
> instead of the adelphia.net one. Bad idea??

Not necessarily bad... just recognize that there are many
address-harvester bots out there looking for new addresses to spam.  If
you change your address frequently enough for that not to be an issue, or
if you have good enough spam filters (or keyword filters like I use on the
news address, but I still munge it), or if you only use the address on a
limited few private newsgroups (not distributed off the server you are on,
like many ISP groups), or if you simply don't care about getting tens to
hundreds of spams a day, then using a real "in the clear" address
shouldn't be a problem.

If it is a problem, I'd suggest a dedicated address used only for news (so
you can change it if it gets too bad), possibly of the form news.beartooth
(or n3w5.b34rt00th maybe, if you want to avoid some of the dictionary
attacks) at adelphia.munged.net.munged, for the reasons I outlined.

>> Here, I actually use a dedicated address for my (non-gmane) news address
>> as well.  [...]
> 
> What is a dedicated address when it's at home??

My ISP allows up to seven mail addresses per account.  I use one
specifically for news, of the form news.username at... so I can, as I
explained, use a keyword filter.  All my news posts have instructions for
both unmunging the address and using the keyword, so (1) there's less spam
because the address is only posted in munged form, more difficult for the
address harvester bots to process, and (2) even when they do get it, the
spam is easily sorted out because it doesn't have the keyword in the
subject line, as instructed by my sig.  I've had absolutely zero spam on
that address that got the keyword right, altho I do get some that gets
auto-filtered because it doesn't have the keyword.

Another alternative I've seen, for those that actually control their own
domain, is "expiring" addresses of the form news-200606 at... (for June
2006), activating the new one a week early (so July's would activate June
23 or so, set a cron job to do it) and leaving the old one active an extra
3 weeks (so May's would only deactivate when July's is setup), just in
case, so each address is actually active two months and there's always two
addresses actually active, the current one, and either the old one or the
one that's about to be current.  Then, the sig says something like "My
address in December of 2050 will be news-205012 as in the from, my address
in January of 2000 was news-200001, please adjust the address accordingly
to send me mail."



-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman