Interestingly, I was just having a conversation about spam and harvesting
of email addresses, just the other day.
One function that is available in the email specification that most people
do not know about, and even some email clients won't support is the
extended address. You can put a plus sign between your ID and the at
sign. And then you can put anything you want between the plus sign and at
sign. Most email clients will just accept the information between the
plus and at, and ignore it.
Why is this useful? You can use that information to more easily filter
incoming spam, or see just who has sold your email addi to the spammers.
For example, say I am leaving my address on some blog site, because it
requires an email address to leave a comment or something. I can put in,
as my address.
dr25+blogcomm...@andrew.cmu.edu
If I ever get an email from somewhere and the To address is
dr25+blogcomm...@andrew, I know where they got the address from.
Or, say I want to make use of a one time coupon or something on a web
site, but know they will start sending me crap every week, stuff that I
don't want. I can sign up on the site with an email address of
dr25+nos...@andrew.cmu.edu and then create a rule in my email client that
says, anything with a To address of dr25+NoSpam, or even just anything
with NoSpam in the To header, just delete it.
It doesn't always work because some web sites won't accept the extended
address, or they are smart enough to remove any extended part of the
address when they spam you. Never-the-less it can be helpful.
--
Blue skies.
Dan Rossi
Carnegie Mellon University.
E-Mail: d...@andrew.cmu.edu
Tel: (412) 268-9081
For answers to frequently asked questions about this list visit:
http://www.jaws-users.com/help/
