"Denver Braughler"..
> John A Bertoglio wrote:
> > This is not possible in a public newsgroup.

Clearly, this statement is incorrect and I withdraw it. Virtually anything
is possible if you own the server. The real question is: Is it worth doing?

>
> Just have a look at the Perl script or whatever receives NNTP posts
> and munge the addresses in the headers.
>
Anything that can be munged by a script can be unmunged by another script.
Clearly, people who put enought effort to spoof users of news groups would
put additonal effort into reversing simple munging. Technical newsgroups are
typically populated by affluent individuals who are prime targets of various
internet scams. To truly protect, the script would have to do some kind of
random trashing that was still (potentially) human readable. Sadly, the
jerks who send spam mail can try endless permutations of munged emails until
they get one that doesn't bounce. Since they generally hijack email servers,
they have no interest in efficiency.

> (Or ISC could write a newsgroup in Cache' that would do it.)

A fairly significant undertaking, wouldn't you agree?

>
> There is no rule the the From: has to appear in clear text
> in a public newsgroup hosted on a privately owned server.
>
No, but I like the ability to communicate directly with NG users. Any method
that munged an address to be unreadable by a sophisticated script would also
leave me guessing.

There is a solution, a private email-based list. But this has the problem of
access.

> I say it is possible and fairly easy.

Anything is possible. Not everything is worth doing.




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