On Fri, 13 Jun 1997, Sean Witham wrote:
> Any further thought on the idea of supporting tempory email address
> that expire based on replaceing the lcoal part of an email adddress
> with a unique random string that maps to the local email address and
> expirery date ? Something simple to use for a user and powerful enough
> to stop/track spammers.
Eh? Haven't I been arguing with you over the last few days about whether
to use 2-digit or 4-digit year numbers in precisely this facility?
I have implemented this in the development version of Exim, but am
having second thoughts about actually releasing it for several reasons:
(1) A lesser reason is the 2/4 digit year controversy; a way round that
could be found.
(2) We had a discussion about such a facility here, and the consensus
was that it is a bad thing to encourage lots of people to create lots of
addresses that will fail. Essentially the view was that this particular
cure would be worse than the disease because, for example, postings to
Usenet get archived, and people scan the archive for a long time and
expect to be able to get in touch with the posters; if they get "unknown
user" they are liable to bother the postmaster at the relevant site.
(3) Nick Waterman pointed out that you could already provide something
similar using suffixes to local parts if you really want to.
Philip
--
Philip Hazel University Computing Service,
ph10@??? New Museums Site, Cambridge CB2 3QG,
P.Hazel@??? England. Phone: +44 1223 334714
