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Protecting your email with 'AT domain DOT com' is making it easier to find

varenhor.st

21–30 of 42 posts

Re: Protecting your email with 'AT domain DOT com' is making it easier to find

#21
post #9
post #2

Whatever, I never get spam with Gmail.

How do you know Gmail doesn't misclassify valid mail as spam? This is what terrifies me about the thought of using a spam filter: false positives.

For about 1 year I checked my spam folder. After never seeing a false positive, and only 1 or 2 spam in my inbox, I stopped checking.

aside: for poor man's obfuscation (like in my HN profile) I do jhl805atgmaildotcom ... my belief is that this is hard to extract automatically.

Re: Protecting your email with 'AT domain DOT com' is making it easier to find

#22
post #3

A basic search also returns things like "XYZ(AT)gmail(DOT)com", "XYZ[at]gmail[dot]com" and xyz.at.gmail.dot.com . It returns everything, no matter how clever you think you are. And it's not that hard to write a regexp that replace this all into your actual email...

My gmail address is not fark.sam, but if it was you could still figure it out. Getting a regex to do that correctly would be a pain. As would replace the v with a n in avother@gmail address. Still my gmail account was getting spam before I started to use it. So I think simple spray and pray approaches will catch most people.

Re: Protecting your email with 'AT domain DOT com' is making it easier to find

#25
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I used spam filtering I was receiving perhaps ten spams for every valid mail. This made it very difficult to scan my filtered mail. There was just so much of it.

When using Gmail I have a bunch of filters that make it easier to read through my spam mail. For instance: IF X email is in the spam folder AND contains any of the words (Cialis, Viagra, Rolex, etc...) -> Move it immediately to the trash. This cuts down the number of emails that stay in my spam folder by a huge margin, and makes it much easier to check for false positives. That being said, I no longer even bother che…

so if someone includes the word 'specialist' in an email to you, you would never see it. spe cialis t

Re: Protecting your email with 'AT domain DOT com' is making it easier to find

#26
post #9
post #2

Whatever, I never get spam with Gmail.

How do you know Gmail doesn't misclassify valid mail as spam? This is what terrifies me about the thought of using a spam filter: false positives.

My take on this: the benefit of filtering spam largely outweighs the downside of false positives (which, as far as I know, never happened to me and if it did, it probably wasn't that bad since I didn't notice). If someone really needs to contact me, the said person can message me on my various social profiles or simply call me.

Re: Protecting your email with 'AT domain DOT com' is making it easier to find

#27
post #24

I haven't heard of any email harvesters getting around my Email Icon Generator (yes, it is the original!). Just enter your email and it gives you an image of your email address to link to. http://services.nexodyne.com/email/

Nice tool, although embedding images isn't always an option. Thanks for sharing.

Re: Protecting your email with 'AT domain DOT com' is making it easier to find

#28
post #9
post #2

Whatever, I never get spam with Gmail.

How do you know Gmail doesn't misclassify valid mail as spam? This is what terrifies me about the thought of using a spam filter: false positives.

I don't use gmail for anything that can't be missed. I periodically run a search in my work mail Spam folder for my first name - anything addressed to me will have Jacob in it, but the spam can't work it out from the address (jaldridge@).

Found one false positive in the last six months, and even that was a mailing list so didn't matter.

Re: Protecting your email with 'AT domain DOT com' is making it easier to find

#29

I like to say James2456 of Gmail it's the avant garde thing to do

I like that. I've been using "my.username at gmail" ... fairly close but I might switch to "of". As a bonus it might filter out humans you'd rather not converse with as well.

Re: Protecting your email with 'AT domain DOT com' is making it easier to find

#30
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I used spam filtering I was receiving perhaps ten spams for every valid mail. This made it very difficult to scan my filtered mail. There was just so much of it.

When using Gmail I have a bunch of filters that make it easier to read through my spam mail. For instance: IF X email is in the spam folder AND contains any of the words (Cialis, Viagra, Rolex, etc...) -> Move it immediately to the trash. This cuts down the number of emails that stay in my spam folder by a huge margin, and makes it much easier to check for false positives. That being said, I no longer even bother che…

If you've reviewed the spam folder so closely you're certain you have no false positives, it may not be saving you any time. If you give it a more cursory review, then your claim is really, "I've never noticed a false positive."
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