Re: [anti-spam-wg] antispam suggestion

[Walter Ian Kaye walter@localhost]

At 12:41 p +0400 10/19/2007, Alexander Kolesnik didst inscribe upon 
an electronic papyrus:

> Dear sirs,
>
> Last  time  I'm  receiving  a  lot  of  spam  to my RIPE contact
> email.
>
> I have a suggestion that will probably help to reduce spam to emails
> provided in RIPE whois output:
> 1. Substitute email addresses in whois output with something like "use
> http://www.ripe.net/whois";

Replacing an email address with an HTTP URL is good. (Although just 
today I got a spam via my web form; but that is so inefficient for a 
spammer, it's rarely used. How flattering that they bothered. Heh.)

> 2. Substitute letters in emails at http://www.ripe.net/whois with
> their graphical representation or use javascript to build the text
> that spam robots will be unable to parse.
> 3. Add following text to your whois web-engine: "You need
> javascript-compatible (graphics-compatible) browser to see emails".

Locking out text-only browsers like Lynx is bad.

There are many ways to text-munge an email address. For example:
tldcomdommicrosoftusrbillg or billg [at] microsoft [dot] com
A human can figure that out easily but it'll just look like a random 
string to a spambot. The encoding format could even change at random 
intervals.

-Walter
a Lynx user (even on Mac OS X)