Hi all,

back in the 90ies/early 2000s one was advised to never include ones true email address in usenet posts, lest all spamming hell break loose.

Recently I see some users use their actual email adresses here on tildes news net, but also on other services like news.aioe.org. Which I actually like a lot. I think it's fun to see folks true email adresses, since often they hint at which tilde / pubnix or whereever folks are writing from. Here on tilde
it's probably not a problem, since it's an isolated network.

But anyway. What's everyones take on this in the 2020ies? true email or obfuscated@nowhere.is.invalid?

cheers,

lkh
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On 2022-06-24, lkh@cosmic.voyage <lkh@cosmic.voyage> wrote:

Hi all,

back in the 90ies/early 2000s one was advised to never include ones
true email address in usenet posts, lest all spamming hell break
loose.

I tend to keep my email addresses out of plain text online for that
reason. Maybe it's not as important to people with better spam
protections these days, but it's a long standing habit.

But... for cosmic.voyage at the least it's not a problem. Our server
whitelists emails to and from other tilde and pubnix servers, but
anything else will be rejected. Spam away, we don't care!
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lkh@cosmic.voyage wrote:

back in the 90ies/early 2000s one was advised to never include ones true email
address in usenet posts, lest all spamming hell break loose.

Recently I see some users use their actual email adresses here on tildes news net, but also on other services like news.aioe.org. Which I actually like a lot. I think it's fun to see folks true email adresses, since often they hint at which tilde / pubnix or whereever folks are writing from. Here on tilde it's probably not a problem, since it's an isolated network.

It's not a problem at least until someone sets up a web view of
everything here, then if addresses aren't obscured they could
easily get picked up by web crawlers, which could be years after
the posts were made.

But anyway. What's everyones take on this in the 2020ies? true email or obfuscated@nowhere.is.invalid?

I only occasionally check my tilde user email and nobody talks
about anything particularly important with it anyway, so if it got
spammed to death (though it's spam-free so far) it wouldn't be the
same disaster as if that happened to one of my 'real' addresses.
But with the real ones I've given up on spam filtering entirely
because what I'm getting now is all scam stuff designed to be hard
to filter and attempting to do so is so unreliable that one has to
check one's junk folder as much as the main inbox anyway.

On the other hand many other people seem to never check their junk,
and it's my emails that very often seem to go into it, just because
they're not from the likes of Gmail or Yahoo. This is a much bigger
problem for me, because even if the SMTP logs show the message
being received A-OK (if I'm sending via my own server, and I don't
have to be to have these problems), I'm still unsure about whether
it will ever be read.

So I'm in favour of obscured addresses in general, because it means
my life is easier without using an unreliable spam filter, and it
also means my life is easier because fewer people are forced into
relying more on _their_ spam filter which considers me a non-person
for not being @gmail.com. But in general I'm just fed up with the
state of email.
--

- The Free Thinker | gopher://aussies.space/1/%7efreet/
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The Free Thinker <freet@aussies.space> wrote:

and it also means my life is easier because fewer people are
forced into relying more on _their_ spam filter which considers
me a non-person for not being @gmail.com.

That said, I just remembered reading a blog post a little while ago
where someone's Gmail account was actually putting emails from a
Google Groups mailing list into junk, so maybe these things aren't
so discriminatory, just stupid.
--

- The Free Thinker | gopher://aussies.space/1/%7efreet/
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On 2022-06-24, James Tomasino <tomasino@cosmic.voyage> wrote:

back in the 90ies/early 2000s one was advised to never include ones
true email address in usenet posts, lest all spamming hell break
loose.

I tend to keep my email addresses out of plain text online for that
reason. Maybe it's not as important to people with better spam
protections these days, but it's a long standing habit.

For me, I've had my email address since 1995, so that ship sailed a LONG time ago. I just use my email address on Usenet and it doesn't seem to have made things any worse. If someone has a "fresh" address it might be different, but I
think that other sources of data would be more likely (web crawls, bought lists,
etc).

Not an expert though, so take this with a grain of salt.

John
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On 2022-06-24, James Tomasino <tomasino@cosmic.voyage> wrote:

But... for cosmic.voyage at the least it's not a problem. Our server whitelists emails to and from other tilde and pubnix servers, but
anything else will be rejected. Spam away, we don't care!

This is an elegant idea! I've been thinking about setting up a Tilde (post
on that topic coming shortly in this group) and dealing with email abuse has been one of the things holding me back. I like that.

- John
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On 2022-06-30, John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> wrote:

On 2022-06-24, James Tomasino <tomasino@cosmic.voyage> wrote:

But... for cosmic.voyage at the least it's not a problem. Our server
whitelists emails to and from other tilde and pubnix servers, but
anything else will be rejected. Spam away, we don't care!

This is an elegant idea! I like that.

I like this idea too. Kind of a KISS & non-commercial email sender accreditation.

gopher://gopherpedia.com:70/0/Email%20sender%20accreditation

-Ben
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On 2022-06-24, lkh@cosmic.voyage <lkh@cosmic.voyage> wrote:

Recently I see some users use their actual email adresses here on
tildes news net, but also on other services like news.aioe.org

[...]

But anyway. What's everyones take on this in the 2020ies?
true email or obfuscated@nowhere.is.invalid?

I don't obfuscate my address, even on Usenet. The way I see it,
the more "food" a bayesian filter gets, the more accurate it becomes...
--
Dario Niedermann. Also on the Internet at:

gopher://darioniedermann.it/ <> https://www.darioniedermann.it/
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