How to hide email addresses w/o breaking stuff.

From: Bjarni R. Einarsson <bre_at_netverjar.is_at_hypermail-project.org>
Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 01:18:16 +0100
Message-ID: <20000125011816.B14177_at_diskordiah.mmedia.is>


Hi,

Was anyone else interested in hiding their subscribers email addresses, like I discussed earlier on this mailing list? At the time I was mostly worried about spam, but since then I've become convinced that spam or no spam, it's always a good idea not to reveal any more personal info about list subscribers to "the outside world" than necessary.

The ability to reply to people directly from the web page is obviously also very valuable. Since I like to have my cake and eat it too, I thought up (and coded in perl) a way to do both: hide the email addresses while letting people reply directly from the web page.

Basically, I replace anything that looks like an email address with a fake address when the message is recieved, record *both* addresses in a file, and then use a specialized mailcommand to reverse the process when people want to reply. This completely protects the users of the list from having their email addresses revealed, without sacrificing the ability to contact people directly from within the archive.

If anyone is interested in my code, please let me know. If nobody is, then I don't think I'll bother to clean it up and untangle it from the rest of the site I'm building... :-)

Also, this idea would be very easy to implement directly in some future version of hypermail.

-- 
Bjarni R. Einarsson                           PGP: 02764305, B7A3AB89
 bre_at_netverjar.is           -><-           http://www.mmedia.is/~bre/

Netverjar gegn ruslpósti: http://www.netverjar.is/baratta/ruslpostur/
Received on Tue 25 Jan 2000 02:21:28 AM GMT

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