Antony Stone wrote:
> Incidentally, I had no idea what "a pre-mangled address for the web archive
> readers" meant.
You are the second person to mention this, the first in a direct
message to me. Which means there will be many. Sorry. Let me
explain.
Due to too much caution about spammers harvesting email addresses from
web pages most web mailing list archives block display of anything
that looks similar to an email address. I say similar because often
false positives are a problem. Which is super annoying!
While I am still reading email with an actual mail reader (I am using
mutt) I know that the majority of all email users today are using a
web-mail interface to email. And many of those people are using
mailing list archives to read mailing lists. Therefore I try to write
with that reading interface of those other users in mind.
This web archive hiding of anything that looks like an email address
makes posting email addresses in responses to people more difficult
than it should be. I happen to be aware of the problem and sensitive
to the breakage and therefore, when I remember to do so, I try to
include both the address written plain as it should be and also
encoded in the typical way for a human to be able to read it and
reconstruct it back into the original.
Here are some examples of my message with the email address hidden,
obscured, "mangled" by the web mail readers, for the archives listed
for this mailing list. So that you can see the problem that is being
addressed by including both a plain email address and also a human
readable but encoded address to avoid the hiding.
says "[hidden email]"
http://spamassassin.1065346.n5.nabble.com/How-do-you-set-nomail-for-the-List-td161302.html
says "[email protected]" with those dots mangling it
https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg108060.html
says "[email protected]" again with different dots mangling it
https://markmail.org/search/list:org.apache.spamassassin.users#query:list%3Aorg.apache.spamassassin.users+page:1+mid:5tjzft7smag2433m+state:results
Meanwhile other archives show the message plain.
https://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/spamassassin-users/202104.mbox/browser
https://marc.info/?l=spamassassin-users&m=161893573926245&w=2
Sorry for perhaps obscure and confusing reference to "pre-mangling"
it. I meant I was going to get ahead of the web archive manglers and
do it myself so that my "pre-mangled" version would be left un-mangled
and therefore still readable and possible to reconstruct.
And also even though the OP was asking the question that means there
are many more people who would like to know the answer to it too who
are wanting to know but not wanting to ask. And some of them will use
the web to search for wisdom and find one of the above email archives.
If they find a good archive without mangling then they have their
answer. If they find a bad archive that mangles then they are left
still looking. However in this case, hopefully, my answer is still
useful to them even on a bad archive as they can assemble it
themselves.
https://xkcd.com/979/
Hopefully that explains what I meant there! :-)
Bob
