How to hide email addresses w/o breaking stuff.

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From: Bjarni R. Einarsson (bre@netverjar.is)
Date: Mon Jan 24 2000 - 18:18:16 CST


Hi,

Was anyone else interested in hiding their subscribers email addresses,
like I discussed earlier on this mailing list? At the time I was
mostly worried about spam, but since then I've become convinced that
spam or no spam, it's always a good idea not to reveal any more
personal info about list subscribers to "the outside world" than
necessary.

The ability to reply to people directly from the web page is obviously
also very valuable. Since I like to have my cake and eat it too, I
thought up (and coded in perl) a way to do both: hide the email
addresses while letting people reply directly from the web page.

Basically, I replace anything that looks like an email address with a
fake address when the message is recieved, record *both* addresses in a
file, and then use a specialized mailcommand to reverse the process
when people want to reply. This completely protects the users of the
list from having their email addresses revealed, without sacrificing
the ability to contact people directly from within the archive.

If anyone is interested in my code, please let me know. If nobody is,
then I don't think I'll bother to clean it up and untangle it from the
rest of the site I'm building... :-)

Also, this idea would be very easy to implement directly in some future
version of hypermail.

-- 
Bjarni R. Einarsson                           PGP: 02764305, B7A3AB89
 bre@netverjar.is           -><-           http://www.mmedia.is/~bre/
Netverjar gegn ruslpósti: http://www.netverjar.is/baratta/ruslpostur/

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