RE: [hypermail] suggestion for additional feature to Hypermail

Thank you both for the replies. I was indeed inquiring more about the encoding of all the characters as their HTML equivalents. We've had quite a bit of success in implementing this on our website, and would like to see the ability in HyperMail if possible.

We realize it may be a stopgap measure, but at this point we'll take whatever we can get.<grin> And as Jose said, this was mentioned in a recent report by the Center for Democracy and Technology (http://www.cdt.org/speech/spam/030319spamreport.shtml). Spammers may start trying to read for these encoded characters, but it will make their operations more process-intensive and hopefully, more expensive. As the fight against viruses has proved, it's not about winning the war, it's just about winning each battle as they come. For us, it comes down to at least making them work for it, rather than just putting the addresses out there.

I guess the only permanent solution is to display addresses as unlinked image files. You lose the functionality of being able to click on the address and generate an e-mail, but the information is still there at least.

Again, thanks for your replies and any advice you can provide, or help you can offer, would be much appreciated.

Regards,

Jason Byrne
Communications Editor
ARIN -----Original Message-----
From: Jose Kahan [mailto:jose.kahan_at_w3.org] Sent: Wednesday, April 23, 2003 12:21 PM To: kent landfield
Cc: Jason Byrne; hypermail_at_hypermail.org Subject: Re: [hypermail] suggestion for additional feature to Hypermail

Kent,

I think Jason is talking more about coding all the characters as HTML entities. Something like converting

        mailto:anaddress_at_someplace

into (false example)

        &x#24242;x &x#103; .... and so on.

This came in a recent report about spam. It will only buy some time, though, until the bots become smarter. You only need a convertion table to get the real characters.

It shouldn't be hard to add that option, I guess. We are already escaping many special characters.

BTW, the wai changes are progressing!

-jose

[snip]
>
> There are things in hypermail that may be of use now. This is from
> running a "hypermail -v > tmp.rc".
>
> # replace any _at_ sign with this string, if spam flags enabled
> antispam_at = _at_

[snip] Received on Wed 23 Apr 2003 08:51:58 PM GMT