[microformats-discuss] hCard and spam

[Sam Deane]

On 21 Jul 2005, at 16:10, Robert Bachmann wrote:

> But I tested some - I think popular - email spiders [1] they weren't
> able to deal with "@". So I think it's not a bad idea to include
> this technique in further hCard "how tos". [2]

I don't want to get into a "doesn't", "does", "doesn't", "does too",  
argument, so I'll shut up after this post.

I take your point that it might be a short-term work around. I'd say  
though that the spiders can't cope now because they don't need to,  
because not many addresses are encoded like that. As soon as that  
encoding becomes more common,  the spiders will catch up. In the  
meantime, we will have made the format less intuitive and less human- 
readable (yes, some humans will find themselves reading or writing  
the xml, for whatever reason).

I think that the way to fight spam is by fixing the holes in the  
email system, so that people can be held to account for the mail they  
send.  How to do that is an interesting topic, but probably not  
appropriate for this list!