[rfc-i] Fwd: I-D ACTION:draft-hoffman-rfc-author-guide-00.txt

[Alex Rousskov]

On Tue, 7 Sep 2004, Henning Schulzrinne wrote:

> My perception, backed by experiments on "honeypot" web pages, is 
> that simply obscuring of email addresses, such as braden-at-isi.edu, 
> maybe even braden @ isi.edu, or braden%40isi.edu will fool automated 
> address harvesters.

Automated harvesters are being improved. I doubt the above trick, even 
if it works today, would have any long-term impact.

It seems reasonable to me to provide sufficient contact information, 
where "sufficient" is defined by the author. After all, IESG or RFC 
Editor currently do not have a reliable way to identify an author. 
Thus, any other policy would simply encourage concerned folks to 
submit fake information.

> If the address database is protected by something as simple as the 
> image-recognition "Turing" test, robot address crawlers would not be 
> able to get to them.

Same for automated tools that need such access for legitimate reasons.

Since RFCs are long-lived documents, I would just hope that the spam 
crawlers problem is solved soon enough, by means external to RFC 
Editor or address rendering.

Alex.