[Design] [Question] Email addresses and SPAM

[Grant Baillie]

While we're recapitulating spam experiences...

- I get about 6 spams a day sent directly to this address, and OSAF's  
spam filter catches the vast majority. The address itself shows up in  
a bunch of publicly visible places (list archives, svn archives,  
bugzilla, at least), and is probably also not a difficult address to  
guess. Interestingly, I have another variation on this address  
(@o11n.org instead of osafoundation.org) that's just as guessable  
from a dictionary point of view, and only appears in obscured form  
(on my publicly viewable wiki page), and that I've never received any  
spam sent to that address. (It's received a couple from real humans,  
which is of course the point :). I'm not sure how dictionary-style  
spamming selects domains, though.

- I have received very few (probably 30 at most) spams to my personal  
(.Mac) account in 5 years or so of use. I do know of two instances (b/ 
c they were reported as mail client bugs!) of their spam filter  
(Brightmail, at the time) swallowing legitimate mails. I give out  
this address to friends and random sites on the web that want an  
email address, FWIW, though I don't post to lists from it.

- My old (apple.com) work address received a similarly small amount  
of spam over the years. I used to post intermittently to public  
mailing lists from that address; in fact if you google my full name,  
some of those postings show up. However, the archives of those lists  
obscured email addresses, and that address doesn't show up in searches.

- My gmail account, which I have only ever used for signing up  
friends (back in the day), arranging my interviews @ OSAF, and Google  
Summer of Code, has never received a single spam.

- I have a publicly visible address (info at some-domain.org) that gets  
about 1 legitimate mail a week, and 20-30 spams a day. My ISP's spam  
filter seems to let 1-2 of those through a day, and also does an  
amazingly consistent job of mercilessly tagging all the legitimate  
mails as spam. As you might guess, that means it's basically useless ;).

--Grant