Email address use

The email address, in recent years, has become a highly prized piece of currency among spammers (AKA mass-emailers, junk mailers, jerkyheads.)

Because of this, spammers have come up with countless devious ways to gather email addresses from public web pages.

The OLPC Wiki 5,000+ pages are publically available, so please do not post somebody's email address on the wiki unless you're certain they don't mind. This includes using <mailto:> links, which are just as visible as plain text addresses to address-collecting programs.

Want to help clean the site up? Then use some judgement. If you see an email address in the wiki, don't just randomly change it to a form like "foo AT bar DOT com" or "foo@NOSPAMbar.com"; all those silly forms are as obvious to spammers as they are to you. Also, please remember that there are many deliberately published email addresses that should not be changed (such as gnu@toad.com, help@laptop.org, devel@laptop.org, etc).

A little more detail, for those who are interested:

• Using "obscure" formats like "joe AT example DOT com" is a common practice, but is useless. It is preferable to use an ordinary plain text email address or <mailto:> links. See more detail at the old 2003 Berkely spam harvest study excerpt. There's also an excellent wikipedia article at Address munging, which cautions, "Many see it (address munging) as an attempt to fix a symptom rather than solving the real problem of e-mail spam, at the expense of causing problems for innocent users."

• MediaWiki, the software that powers wiki.laptop.org, appears to have been designed to discourage web-crawling robots (like Googlebot) from indexing non-current pages. It does this through the use of <meta> tags. The use of this technique is described at [broken link to Google]. In practice this is ineffective protection.

• MediaWiki also allows anyone to "Email this user" assuming both people are registered and both have confirmed email addresses.

Source

• Freegeek.org (original): http://wiki.freegeek.org/index.php/Email_address_use