Martin said:
At the time (a few years back) I did not want to get spammed out of I
would be interestedexistance & have not bothered with it since.
I you can offer a better suggestion I would be interested
Proper syntax is still '"commentstring" <emailaddress>', something like
'"Martin" <
[email protected]>'. That doesn't mean you have to
display a valid e-mail address. As you know, you could munge it or use
a completely bogus one. If you use a munged one, don't bother adding
"nospam" to it as spambots have several strings they parse out for such
common munges. If you use a bogus one, decide on one that is not
currently registered (otherwise you are pointing spambots at a someone's
domain) or cannot be registered. One trick is to use .invalid as the
TLD (top-level domain) instead of .com, .net, .org, and the like.
Another is to use characters that aren't allowed in domain names.
Remember that even a domain that not registered now might be in the
future, and it might then be hosted somewhere. It is rude to point
spambots at someone's domain to afflict them with the spam that you
energized at them.
If you look at the From header in my posts, it is a bogus e-mail address
*BUT* it is in valid syntax for an e-mail address. There is no .LH
top-level domain so any domain that I specify won't be registered.
It is possible to specify a legitimate e-mail address (i.e., a defined
and active account) but eliminate getting any non-human generated spam
targeting it. Simply open an account that is ONLY used for when you
want to take discussions offline of Usenet and into e-mail. Then define
a server-side rule that discards any e-mails that don't contain a
specific string, called a passcode, in the Subject header. In the
signature of your posts, you note "E-mail: Append <passcode> to Subject
to avoid immediate delete." The passcode can be any string you like as
long as it isn't anything that would normally be used in the Subject
header, like "&MRTN-38#". Any e-mails sent to that account that don't
have the passcode in the Subject get immediately deleted by your rule.
Of course, there are e-mail accounts where you can set a server-side
option to make the account exclusive in that only e-mails from known
senders (in your address book) are accepted - except they typically dump
the "bad" e-mails in a Junk folder rather than actually delete them.
Spambots don't know how to read instructions in a signature. Any spams
sent to you won't have your passcode in the Subject header. Spambots
harvest e-mail addresses, not the bodies of posts, so the spammer won't
ever see your instructions on how to circumvent your passcode filter.
Even if the spambots did collect the bodies of posts, spammers aren't
going to wade through them all to read instructions. If some malcontent
in the newsgroup submits your [unmunged] e-mail address to a mailing
list, that source won't be adding the passcode to the Subject so you
still won't get their spam that the malcontent was hoping to afflict you
with. So it is possible to use a legit e-mail address. Just use an
account that is only for taking newsgroup discussions offline to e-mail,
add a passcode filter on the Subject header, and tell users how to add
the passcode if they don't want to run afoul of your filter.
If you never want to take Usenet discussions offline via e-mail (as I
do) then don't bother opening an e-mail account for use only with
newsgroups (or forums) and using a passcode filter to avoid spam. Just
use a bogus From header but *do* use a properly syntaxed value. Also,
there are some NNTP servers that won't accept posts that do not contain
a validly syntaxed e-mail address in the From header and another reason
to use a proper value for the From header. Unless you want to get into
ISO encoding of the commentstring portion of the From header, only use
ASCII-7 characters; otherwise, your use of upper-ASCII characters often
results in not having the effect you wanted. Instead of seeing your
wonderfully chosen set of upper-ASCII characters, other users may simply
see square boxes representing non-displayable characters.