Justin Erenkrantz wrote:
3. We should probably turn on the email-address-obfiscation feature. I
personally would prefer if everyone could just use proper spam
filtering, but I think the general expectation nowadays is that we try
to avoid displaying raw addresses.
I think this feature is lame (and said so when it was proposed).
Spammers are just going to de-obfuscate anyway. Enabling this provides
a false layer of security that does no one any good.
As has been pointed out, this is a trade off. You can get real
protection at the cost of losing the ability to find real email
addresses. Or you can get protection that will work against 95% or more
of current web-robots and worms with a simple but reversible
obfiscation. I favor the latter, but mod_mbox currently provides only
the former.
Although I agree with Justin in principle, the fact is that we are one
of a very small number of major archives that provide unobfiscated email
addresses. As such, we are a major draw for worms and address
harvesters. Is this really an area where we want to stand out?
Joshua.
