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I'd suggest taking a look at the approach used on Sourceforge, which provides a mediated method of sending a message to a user, without revealing an actual e-mail address.
If the user responds, their e-mail address is revealed, but the e-mail address is not revealed to potential spammers.
Best wishes,
Bruce Esrig
-----Original Message-----
From: Robin Cover [mailto:robin@oasis-open.org]
Sent: Thursday, March 30, 2006 11:41 AM
To: Scott Prentice
Cc: webmaster@oasis-open.org; dita-fa-edboard@lists.xml.org
Subject: RE: [dita-fa-edboard] Reminder: dita-fa-edboard list is public
Thanks, Scott.
OASIS Staff is studying "the spam problem", and the idea of email
address obfuscation in archives is certainly one of many proposed
solutions. I will make your message available to the OASIS
team members.
Until now, I think management believes (beginning at the level of
the OASIS Board) that public accountability trumps the
individual's (possible) right to be involved in standards
activity as a anonymous identity.
For example, the OASIS TC Process [1] requires the publication of
email addresses in several contexts, including the names and
email addresses of TC proposers [2], names and email
addressed of TC Discussion Lists proposers, the name and email
address of the TC Chair or co-Chairs as well as other positions
such as secretary, editor, etc. Several other policies also
require that email addresses be made public: on specifications,
etc.
The motivation is easy to understand: personal names, even when
joined with company affiliations, are not sufficient to
unambiguously identify a person. An email address has global
scope by virtue of the protocol.
Thus, similarly, at W3C:
============================================================
Participants in W3C activities, and subscribers to its lists,
where much of the day-to-day discussion of technical,
operational, and communications issues occurs, rely on the
mailing lists and archives maintained by the W3C to be
persistently accessible repositories of e-mail communications
regarding the various activities and operations of the W3C
and its contributors...
While the W3C is sensitive to the need for protecting
personal information from exploitation by spammers, we
cannot engage in the revision of the archives for the
purpose of decreasing one's vulnerability to Spam.
Archives are historical documents, not personal records.
If a sender posts to a Public forum, it should be understood
the information will be publicly available in perpetuity.
=============================================================
In addition to the above -- the need to ensure public
auditability, transparency, and openness -- many of the people
I have taked to about the matter do not believe that
obfuscating email addresses is the correct (or best) point
at which to attack the email spam problem. For that reason,
the company web sites of (? unstudied) all or most all
major companies contain viewable -- not obfuscated --
email addresses of authors and forum participants. All
web pages can be screen-scraped for email addresses
(harvesting). Trying to prevent publicly visible email
addresses is not (arguably) the best, or effective,
strategy, if I am to believe experts I have talked to.
OASIS will most certainly be taking steps to improve
(anti-) spam technologies. I don't know whether editing
the archives (or otherwise obfuscating email addresses)
will be part of the solution.
Thanks for your comments on the topic.
Robin Cover
[1] http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/process.php
[2] http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2005-10-03-a.html
See the list of 33 proposers
On Thu, 30 Mar 2006, Scott Prentice wrote:
> OK .. this is a hot button of mine, and I need to speak up about this.
> Please accept this as a constructive criticism, and not an angry flame.
> :)
>
> I read the guidelines and I see nothing that explains why email addresses
> are not obfuscated or removed from posts. This is standard practice on
> most modern maillists and is the responsible thing to do. As far as I
> know, everyone has to be registered in some way to be able to post to the
> OASIS lists, therefore, the person's name should be enough of an
> attribution. I realize that even on lists that do remove/munge email
> addresses, it does happen that an address will make it through in plain
> text, this is understandable. But having an archive of lists that are
> known to be chock full of addresses in plain text just encourages them to
> be harvested.
>
> I maintain a separate address for use on lists, and can filter that
> address or dump it altogether if the spam level gets too high. This is the
> best way I've found to deal with this inevitable problem, but it would be
> really nice if OASIS could make an attempt at protecting its members'
> addresses from being harvested. These are the only lists that I'm on that
> this is an issue.
>
> I'd be glad to work with the webmaster to help resolve this issue.
>
> Thanks .. now back to your regularly scheduled programming. :)
>
> ...scott
>
>
> > Not at this time. Our list falls under the OASIS Mail List Guidelines
> > http://www.oasis-open.org/maillists/guidelines.php. There are many good
> > reasons why our lists need to be open and why posts need to be
> > attributable.
> >
> > If anyone has advice for minimizing spam and still retaining public
> > access to our information, please send your thoughts to
> > webmaster@oasis-open.org.
> >
> > Keep in mind, by posting your email on the Focus Area pages, you expose
> > yourself to risk. Death, taxes, and spam...
> >
>
>
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