[uf-discuss] Spam and Microformats Search

[Chris Messina]

I think what Scott said is correct. If Technorati can find your email
address, Microformatted or not, anyone else can -- **especially**
those spammers who you'd rather not have find it (I mean, they spend
all day at this kind of thing).

General trepidations aside, that's why I use Gmail for all my incoming
mail -- with 33,000 spam messages trapped at the moment (with
additional thousands being deleted and caught everyday).

Scott's right -- publishing side protection is a lost cause... just
like not going outside will somehow protect you from the common cold.

That said, there is a remedy: change your hCard to *not* include your
email, or gussy it up, like joe at my domain dot com, and then use
Pingerati to tell them that you've updated the record. AFAIK, if
they've indexed MF data on a page that is subsequently deleted, you
can ping them to have it removed from their index (which of course is
one way that they maintain a clean index).

Chris


On 6/19/06, Scott Reynen <scott at randomchaos.com> wrote:
> On Jun 19, 2006, at 9:56 AM, Patrick Crowley wrote:
>
> > Great job on MF search, guys.
> >
> > My hCard is showing up nicely now, but I noticed my email is sitting
> > out in the open. Any chance you can add spam protection to search
> > results?
>
> Isn't it already sitting out in the open for the search to have
> picked it up?  Publishing-side spam protection is generally a
> placebo.  If a single person with a vulnerable machine has your email
> address, it's available to any persistent spammer even if it's not on
> the web anywhere.  And once one spammer has it, they'll sell it to
> other spammers.  I don't think microformats have much to offer as far
> as spam-fighting.
>
> Peace,
> Scott
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>


-- 
Chris Messina
Agent Provocateur, Citizen Agency &
  Open Source Ambassador-at-Large
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