Re: [tlug] Email address munging in the TLUG archives (C&C)

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On Fri, 8 Dec 2006, Edward Middleton wrote:

> An email address I previously used is already widely disseminated.  I
> have been coming up as the first non-dead Edward Middleton on google for
> some time, and until recently so did my email address.  While I can
> understand your need to disseminate your contact details, the previously
> googlable email account has such a low signal to noise ratio that spam
> filtering is ineffective.

That would be anecdotal evidence, of course.

So here's a contrary anecdote.

I've had web pages up since 1995, and have never made any attempt to
obfuscate my e-mail address. When searching for "Curt Sampson" I've had
the top result on Google since it started, and usually about half the
results lead to pages with my e-mail address on them. I also had the
top links on Altavista when it was still a major search engine, I'm the
first result on Yahoo right now, as well.

I find my spam quite managable. I have fairly moderate SMTP filters
(moderate enough that I keep false positives down to one or two a year,
excepting Bugtraq, which seems to have some posters using a Korean
character encoding, for some reason), and of the 50 spam messages per
day that get through that, my Baysean filter catches all but three or
four of them. (It used to be much better, but for some reason it's
not handling well the current crop of random-text-with-image-attached
spams.)

I have no intention of ever trying to obfuscate my address. It would
almost certainly be quite pointless now, anyway, with Google returning
some 15,900 results for a search on "cjs@example.com".

cjs
--
Curt Sampson       <cjs@example.com>        +81 90 7737 2974