On December 17, 1999 at 11:41, "Dan Harkless" wrote:
> Ah yes, didn't occur to me when you said "hiding sender addresses" that only
> the address in the header was being talked about. People like me who
> reiterate their email addresses in their .sigs will be exposing them. And I
> just checked and mail-archive is indexed by AltaVista, so there certainly is
> a danger from the SPAM-bots that trawl the web picking up all strings
> matching an email address regexp.
One reason addresses in message bodies are not mangled, as you mentioned,
is that they could mangle data that should be be mangled. Mainly
message-ids referenced in bodies that could be hyperlinked.
Another reason is copyright law. If the sender wants to avoid
address harvesting, then they should avoid including his/her address
in the body, or mangle it himself.
> Hmmm, of course there'd still be opportunities to expose addresses, like
> when quoting source files that include people's addresses in comments and so
> on.
People should take care about this, regardless.
> I guess my ideal mailing list archiver would mangle everything that fit an
> email address regexp. Of course, the regexp might accidentally match
See comments above why mangling is not done in bodies.
--ewh
