On Wed, Jun 07, 2023 at 01:30:10PM +0200, Alessandro Vesely wrote: > No, they're not. While attempts that bother legitimate users are to be > avoided, some obfuscation techniques are worth their salt. They impede the > most naive and unfit spammers only. That is, they select a minimal > technical level, thereby reducing the order of magnitude of spam attempts. Actually: no. You've overlooked something that's common knowledge: address lists (and databases, see link below) of all sizes -- some of them enormous -- are for sale, many of them cheaply. The naive/unfit spammers you posit *are* naive/unfit and they're not going to bother collecting addresses via any means, simple or sophisticated: they're just going to buy lists/databases of them from people who are most definitely NOT novices, and *those* people aren't going to be defeated or even slowed down by futile and pointless attempts at obfuscation. It's not that obfuscation et.al. don't work. They've NEVER worked. They're the equivalent of Wile E. Coyote holding an umbrella over his head while a 20-ton rock is dropping toward him -- and they're just as ludicrously ineffective. I just revised a writeup from a few years back to discuss this in some depth. It probably still has some typos in it, but here's a very high-level, introductory (and thus woefully incomplete) discussion explaining how spammers collect address and why obfuscation will have no measurable effect on it: Email address obfuscation is security theater https://www.mailsystemdefense.com/how-spammers-get-addresses.html The TL;DR version of that specifically relevant to the IETF is: the sum total of all IETF mailing lists, data trackers, and other assets is a negligible blip when measured against the totality of these databases. So even if someone could wave a magic wand and make all collection via those stop (and even better, destroy all data that's been previously collected from those no matter where it now resides) it would be very unlikely to make a measurable difference -- even to IETF participants. ---rsk
