On May 17, 2007, at 10:41 AM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
On May 17, 2007, at 06:00, Ian Eiloart wrote:
On 16 May 2007 17:12:10 -0700 James Berry wrote:
Following discussion with several of you, and more thought, my thinking is now:
(1) Obfuscate plain text email addresses by using the form:
- tld/domain/username user@bar.com ==> com/bar/user
- if there are multiple components in the hostname, only the dot before the tld is turned into a slash: user@foo.bar.com ==> com/foo.bar/user
This won't always work (at least, not with simple implementations), since a slash is legal in an email local part (though often banned by local policy). However, if you used "subdomain.tld/localpart" you'd be OK, since the first slash would always be the separator.
I'm also concerned that this looks silly/weird for people whose email addresses are at CCTLDs where the last two components of the email address usually "go together". For example, if your email address is at "mail.example.edu", then it's somewhat ok to encode this as "edu/mail.example", since "mail.example" is the part that the school has control over while "edu" is the part they don't control. However, in the case of Ian, encoding "sussex.ac.uk" as "uk/sussex.ac" makes less sense/looks more strange, since "ac.uk" goes together (is the UK equivalent of "edu").
Good point.
So I would be in favor of changing user.name@mail.example.com into mail.example.com/user.name. Or com.example.mail%user.name. Or something. But in any case making it clear (to both people and machines) which part is the local part and which part is the domain part (which as Ian said is not possible when you use multiple encoding characters to split the domain part into multiple parts).
As Ian pointed out, / isn't really good as it's a valid atext character from rfc 2822. So what if we head back to Salvatore's suggestion of: suxxex.ac.uk:iane That's more readable, and unlikely to be recognized by the spambots. James