question on email account to registering with a judge

[Guest]

Archived from groups: rec.games.diplomacy (More info?)

I'm new to PBEM Diplomacy, and wondering if I would be well advised
NOT to use my genuine day-in-day-out email address as the one
registered with the judge. I see lots of players using hotmail
addresses and wonder if there's a reason (e.g., bots picking up
addresses from judges for spam distribution).

thoughts?

Monty

 

[Guest]

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Montgomery Kosma wrote:
> I'm new to PBEM Diplomacy, and wondering if I would be well advised
> NOT to use my genuine day-in-day-out email address as the one
> registered with the judge. I see lots of players using hotmail
> addresses and wonder if there's a reason (e.g., bots picking up
> addresses from judges for spam distribution).

My guess is that this is due more to other concerns, like not wanting to
get caught "Dipping" at work. Or maybe they just want the Dip e-mail to
go somewhere else. I have filters set up on my account.

(And if you're worried about spam that much, you should make sure you
aren't posting with your real e-mail address. Yours looks real to me.
I read an article somewhere that suggests that if your address is even
slightly mangled, for example my obviously fake ".x" suffix, spammers
will not bother to try demangling them.)

--
Will Berry
Director of Operations, Techwood Con gaming convention
http://www.techwoodcon.com/

 

[Guest]

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Montgomery Kosma wrote:

> I'm new to PBEM Diplomacy, and wondering if I would be well advised
> NOT to use my genuine day-in-day-out email address as the one
> registered with the judge. I see lots of players using hotmail
> addresses and wonder if there's a reason (e.g., bots picking up
> addresses from judges for spam distribution).

It's my impression that the judges do not produce a spam problem, though
of course there are no guarantees.

Lots of people use hotmail because, well, lots of people use hotmail....

 

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Will Berry <wberry@wberry.org.x> writes:

> (And if you're worried about spam that much, you should make sure you
> aren't posting with your real e-mail address. Yours looks real to
> me. I read an article somewhere that suggests that if your address is
> even slightly mangled, for example my obviously fake ".x" suffix,
> spammers will not bother to try demangling them.)

Though _please_ use the .invalid suffix, that's reserved for this
purpose.

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: rec.games.diplomacy (More info?)

Montgomery Kosma wrote:
> I'm new to PBEM Diplomacy, and wondering if I would be well advised
> NOT to use my genuine day-in-day-out email address as the one
> registered with the judge. I see lots of players using hotmail
> addresses and wonder if there's a reason (e.g., bots picking up
> addresses from judges for spam distribution).

I can't think of a way for a spam-bot to pick up email addresses from
a Judge. I use a separate email address for Diplomacy just to make
it easier to separate my Dip-Mail from my non-Dip-Mail.

Eric.
--

 

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"Eric Hunter" <hunter90@comcast.not> writes:

> I can't think of a way for a spam-bot to pick up email addresses from
> a Judge.

I can, but I don't think spammers will go through all that trouble, for
a relatively small amounts of addresses.

However, I guess they could be scraped from game summaries on floc.net,
and elsewhere.

 

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Bjorn Lindstrom <bkhl@elektrubadur.se> wrote:
> Will Berry <wberry@wberry.org.x> writes:

>> (And if you're worried about spam that much, you should make sure you
>> aren't posting with your real e-mail address. Yours looks real to
>> me. I read an article somewhere that suggests that if your address is
>> even slightly mangled, for example my obviously fake ".x" suffix,
>> spammers will not bother to try demangling them.)

> Though _please_ use the .invalid suffix, that's reserved for this
> purpose.

Reserved?! By who, the United World Federation of Moral Spammers?!!
Establishing a hard-and-fast convention for mangling your
email address is pointless. Once it exists, every email-harvester in the
world need but add one line of code to demangle you and add you to their
lists.

 

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nospam@nowhere.edu writes:

> Reserved?! By who, the United World Federation of Moral Spammers?!!

No, here:

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2606.html

> Establishing a hard-and-fast convention for mangling your email
> address is pointless. Once it exists, every email-harvester in the
> world need but add one line of code to demangle you and add you to
> their lists.

I don't really care. Using erroneous From-addresses is bad netiquette as
it is. Just appending .invalid to your address at least lets people deal
with it in a reasonably simple way, if you really can't be bothered to
install a spam filter. (Which you should, since that, in addition to
annoying people, would also actually stop the spam.)

 

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Björn Lindström wrote:
> nospam@nowhere.edu writes:
>
>>Reserved?! By who, the United World Federation of Moral Spammers?!!
>
>>Establishing a hard-and-fast convention for mangling your email
>>address is pointless. Once it exists, every email-harvester in the
>>world need but add one line of code to demangle you and add you to
>>their lists.
>
> I don't really care. Using erroneous From-addresses is bad netiquette as
> it is. Just appending .invalid to your address at least lets people deal
> with it in a reasonably simple way, if you really can't be bothered to
> install a spam filter. (Which you should, since that, in addition to
> annoying people, would also actually stop the spam.)

I think I'm on Mr. Nowhere's side on this one. Very simple obfuscation
schemes like mine are effective partly because they are not always the
same. It probably isn't worth the spammers' time to try removing the
last part of the domain; even though this would get some results, it
will not work on people who use prefix or infix junk or "a at b dot net"
schemes. But if *lots* of people append .invalid to their addresses
when they post, then some spammer will inevitably write a filter and
render it ineffective.

On the flipside, spammers have good business reasons not to bother
de-obfuscating addresses in any case, because people that obfuscate
their addresses will tend more heavily than others not to read spam.

I also don't buy the "bad netiquette" argument at all. There is no
reason in my mind why any ng reader should always be able to personally
contact a poster, rather than just replying to the post. Nor is an
e-mail address necessarily a better form of contact than a URL, for
example. It's just a consequence of the medium.

--
Will Berry
Director of Operations, Techwood Con gaming convention
http://www.techwoodcon.com/

 

[Guest]

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Will Berry <wberry@wberry.org.x> writes:

> I also don't buy the "bad netiquette" argument at all. There is no
> reason in my mind why any ng reader should always be able to
> personally contact a poster, rather than just replying to the post.
> Nor is an e-mail address necessarily a better form of contact than a
> URL, for example. It's just a consequence of the medium.

So why do _you_ think the From-field is required? (Rhetoric question.)

 

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Bjorn Lindstrom <bkhl@elektrubadur.se> wrote:
> Will Berry <wberry@wberry.org.x> writes:

>> I also don't buy the "bad netiquette" argument at all. There is no
>> reason in my mind why any ng reader should always be able to
>> personally contact a poster, rather than just replying to the post.
>> Nor is an e-mail address necessarily a better form of contact than a
>> URL, for example. It's just a consequence of the medium.

> So why do _you_ think the From-field is required? (Rhetoric question.)

I assume (perhaps wrongly) that the rhetorical answer is "so you know
how to reach the poster." This implies the poster wishes to be reached.

It serves the same purpose as a 'username' in any other context -- an
arbitrary name by which we can differentiate one person from another.
It allows attribution of content in heavily-posted threads, and gives
you something to key a killfile on.

(Wasn't there a Usenet feature at one point where you could delete
your own posts? I think the 'From:' header was used to verify ownership
of a post?)

 

[Guest]

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nospam@nowhere.edu writes:

> I assume (perhaps wrongly) that the rhetorical answer is "so you know
> how to reach the poster." This implies the poster wishes to be
> reached.

The question then becomes, is it up to the poster? Why would I care for
the opinions of someone who does not stand by their opinions enough to
even supply a valid return address?

By using the standardised address obfuscation scheme (.invalid), you at
least give other readers a fair chance to filter such comments out.


Anyway, your own non-return-address implies that this is not the reason
for you to obfuscate your address. As I've already pointed out, address
obfuscation:

a) only works to a limited extent

b) the spammers that actually get your address from scraping Usenet
don't show signs of doing any attempts to fix invalid addresses at all,
so you can just as well just append .invalid to it.

c) spam filters are good enough to filter out most of your spam (I get
about 1-2 false negatives/week and zero false positives/ever with
bogofilter), so you can just as well install one of those, stop
worrying, and love the bomb


Unless you come up with anything besides the "I'm a big boy, I can do as
I like"-argument, I have nothing more to say, so I'll just summarise the
thread:

Yes, it's alright to use a hotmail.com address to communicate with the
Judge.

 

[Guest]

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Bjorn Lindstrom <bkhl@elektrubadur.se> wrote:
> nospam@nowhere.edu writes:

>> I assume (perhaps wrongly) that the rhetorical answer is "so you know
>> how to reach the poster." This implies the poster wishes to be
>> reached.

> The question then becomes, is it up to the poster? Why would I care for
> the opinions of someone who does not stand by their opinions enough to
> even supply a valid return address?

Different schools of thought here -- I generally don't want people sending
replies on Usenet posts to my inbox. There's a lot of trolls and psychoes
out there.

> By using the standardised address obfuscation scheme (.invalid), you at
> least give other readers a fair chance to filter such comments out.

Fair enough, that. I will both keep my email address entirely bogus, and
tack ".invalid" at the end. Best of both worlds.


> Anyway, your own non-return-address implies that this is not the reason
> for you to obfuscate your address. As I've already pointed out, address
> obfuscation:

> a) only works to a limited extent

> b) the spammers that actually get your address from scraping Usenet
> don't show signs of doing any attempts to fix invalid addresses at all,
> so you can just as well just append .invalid to it.

> c) spam filters are good enough to filter out most of your spam (I get
> about 1-2 false negatives/week and zero false positives/ever with
> bogofilter), so you can just as well install one of those, stop
> worrying, and love the bomb

I can agree with all of that as long as B) has a big red "yet!" attatched
to the end.

 

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nospam@nowhere.edu.invalid writes:

> Fair enough, that. I will both keep my email address entirely bogus,
> and tack ".invalid" at the end. Best of both worlds.

That's acceptable, I guess. Though I don't get what you need the .edu
bit for. ;-)

> I can agree with all of that as long as B) has a big red "yet!"
> attatched to the end.

I take the liberty of doubting that. Spammers aren't _only_ after
annoying you. (Though it may certainly sometimes seem that way.) Like
any other capitalists they are after profit - and spamming people aware
enough to try avoiding spam this way probably have a very low return
rate, even for spammer standards.