moderator's note regarding spam-block E-mail addresses

[Jonathan Thornburg [remove -animal to reply]]

Please note that if you would like a newsgroup moderator to reply to
your postings (e.g., with rejection messages if they're rejected),
you need to supply a working E-mail address! This implies that a
moderator who has never met you, who may not be from the same culture
as you, and (perhaps most importantly) who doesn't know if you're
writing tongue-in-cheek, needs to be able to *unambiguously*
"unmangle" any anti-spam "mangling" you've used.

For example
barack.REMOVETHIS.obama@whitehouse.gov
barack.NOSPAM.obama@whitehouse.gov
baNraOck.SobPamAaM@whitehouse.gov
"Barack Obama (remove SPAM to reply)" <barackSPAM@whitehouse.gov>
"Barack (remove .physicist to reply)" <barack@whitehouse.einstein.gov>
are all clear enough that I think I could reliably unmangle them.
But an address of the form
barackSPAM@whitehouse.gov
is much less clear to me, and might not be mangled at all (if the
author has a whimsical sense of humor), particularly if the actual
domain looks like a word-play on some common phrase.

--
-- "Jonathan Thornburg [remove -animal to reply]" <jthorn@astro.indiana-zebra.edu>
Dept of Astronomy, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA
"Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the
powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral."

[J. J. Lodder]

Jonathan Thornburg [remove -animal to reply]
<jthorn@astro.indiana-zebra.edu> wrote:

> Please note that if you would like a newsgroup moderator to reply to
> your postings (e.g., with rejection messages if they're rejected),
> you need to supply a working E-mail address! This implies that a
> moderator who has never met you, who may not be from the same culture
> as you, and (perhaps most importantly) who doesn't know if you're
> writing tongue-in-cheek, needs to be able to *unambiguously*
> "unmangle" any anti-spam "mangling" you've used.
>
> For example
> barack.REMOVETHIS.obama@whitehouse.gov
> barack.NOSPAM.obama@whitehouse.gov
> baNraOck.SobPamAaM@whitehouse.gov
> "Barack Obama (remove SPAM to reply)" <barackSPAM@whitehouse.gov>
> "Barack (remove .physicist to reply)" <barack@whitehouse.einstein.gov>
> are all clear enough that I think I could reliably unmangle them.
> But an address of the form
> barackSPAM@whitehouse.gov
> is much less clear to me, and might not be mangled at all (if the
> author has a whimsical sense of humor), particularly if the actual
> domain looks like a word-play on some common phrase.

Even better: use an unmunged (hence working) Reply-To:
and an unusable From:

Reply-To:s are harvested less frequently,
and they are easily changed
without modifying your posting personality.

Newsclients will use the Reply-To: (if there is one)
instead of the From: when repying by mail,
thereby saving those who may want to reply by mail
(like moderators) unnecessary puzzle solving.

Jan