[uf-discuss] Spam and Microformats Search

[sam.sethi at vecosys.com]

Microformats are just building blocks. Microsoft' proprietary Live contacts stores personal details and other info to create my profile.  It resolves this issue of email spam by setting permission levels for the access to this personal data I.e friends, family, co-workers etc.

So in the xmdp profile is there a way to set rel= relationship with a permission.  That way my hcard can be only revealed based on my permissions.  Just a thought 

Sam 

-----Original Message-----
From: "brian suda" <brian.suda at gmail.com>
To: "Microformats Discuss" <microformats-discuss at microformats.org>
Sent: 19/06/06 18:02
Subject: Re: [uf-discuss] Spam and Microformats Search

Drew McLellan wrote:
> This is something I've considered before, but have shied away from and
> opted not to include an email address at all.
>
> Is 'joe at my domain dot com' a valid entry for email in an hCard? I'd
> say not...
>
It looks like EMAIL is represented by "A single text value.", so an
obfuscated email address is technically valid, but certainly not what a
user expects. I suppose this is a throw-back to when there were multiple
TYPES of email addresses, and the standard (mailbox)@domain.tld was not
as ubiquitous as it is now. So the RFC was covering their bases and not
specifying a specific type. iCalendar, on the other hand, does specify
that "The value is a URI as defined by [RFC 1738] or any other IANA
registered form for a URI."

I'm not sure how address book applications handled a non-mailto email
type address?

In the end, i would agree, if you are worried about spam, you shouldn't
publish it in the first place (same goes for phone numbers and
addresses)... i think we are abit naive to think that spammers haven't
figured out how to parse (mailbox) _at_ (domain) . (tld) so obfuscating
is a losing battle. It only hurts the people trying to get in contact
with you.