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Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Gnus: Making your emails a bit more difficult for spammers to harvest

Well, I don't know all the methods that spammers use to harvest email addresses but I got mildly chewed out for putting in email addresses in the reply-to citations of my emails.  I was told to PCYMTNQREAIYR to fix my replies. 

Which I did by configuring Gnus to omit the raw email address in the replies.

;;; setting the reply to omit email address to avoid spam harvesting
;;; see the documentation for line format and the line-function has to
;;; be set explicitly, as per the Changelog.
(setq message-citation-line-format "On %a, %b %d %Y,%F %L wrote:\n")
(setq message-citation-line-function 'message-insert-formatted-citation-line)

Thanks to Daniel Pittman for pointing it out. Though I'm not sure whether it breaks any standards or prevents citation folding, at least for the Gnus mail client at the receiving end.

And there are other acronyms  on the cygwin page that are made up that might be of use too, so be sure to read it