Re: OT: How to Modify Email Addresses for NG Posting??

- G
- Greg Heilers
  
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posted
20 years ago

Tue, Sep 23, 2003 4:02 AM

seems that our posting is ripe material for spammers to scrape our email
> addresses from our posts. > > I've seen some add some language to their address or add another like > hotmail so their real address is masked and/or made unusable for > spammers.. > > how do you modify your address for NG posting? > > I use Netscape Communicator 4.5 (yes I know its old) > > > Pretty sure that my posting on NG's has resulted in my email address > being taken and me receiving the 100's and 100's of Microsoft spam..... > I went to preferences but was not sure if any changes would effect > regular email as well..... and I don't wanna do that. > > > help! > > > Craig

Just find the setting which determines what return email address is "posted". In both the name, and the domain, insert something like NOSPAM. Note that this will only slow down abuse by "spam-bots". It appears the current troubles may be from a real live human being, as even people who have camouflaged their address, are being slammed. If possible, you might even insert a totally "bs" email address, if your news client allows such a thing.

- J
- Jeff C
  
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Vote on answer
posted
20 years ago

Tue, Sep 23, 2003 5:04 PM

Step one: Go into your "preferences" or "Options" dialogue box and change both the "from" and "reply to" addresses. For your "From" address, make it totally unusable. Don't use a real-sounding fake address, because some poor person somewhere in the world may have just picked that to be his real address. The address snipped-for-privacy@privacy.com was created for this purpose. Any mail sent to that address gets a "The person who supplied you this address does not want to hear from you" response. Take a look at my headers for another example of totally munging an address wothout risk of damaging an innocent person.

Step two: Go and sign up for a Hotmail, Yahoo or other free webmail address and put this one in the "reply to" address, This way you can still get replies to your postings, your primary account will not get inundated with junk, and it won't matter too much to you if your reply-to account gets flooded.

Lurk in news:news,admin.net-abuse.email for a while. There's an address-munging FAQ that gets regularly posted.

- A
- artships
  
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Vote on answer
posted
20 years ago

Thu, Sep 25, 2003 7:58 PM

Hi, Craig!

Newsgroups is one of the long-time favorite places for spammers to get e-mail addresses. There's a couple of solutions for not getting the guano.

When you post, you expect to get a couple of replies in the first week, then none thereafter, right? You could get a hotmail account, use that address, and abandon it later. Or, use a spamgourmet address, like I do. See

formatting link

Mine is snipped-for-privacy@spamgourmet.com. Only the first 5 e-mail replies to this will go through spamgourmet and then to me. Thereafter, all replies (and spam) will be dropped on the floor, just as if it were to an abandoned hotmail account. The neat part is that, instead of "google" for the first part, you can put anything, such as "rms_3_25_03", and know exactly when the address was harvested, and from where. You can also nullify the address after just one reply, or reset it after the fifth. And, once you register with spamgourmet, you can make-up any first part on the fly. You can also put any number in the second part, too.

John, Not affiliated, but a very happy user.

ps. I have all my webpages coded with spamgourmet addresses that indicate not only the date it was harvested/used, but also from what IP address. Click any of the mailto's at artships.com to see.