email address anti-spam encoding in portfiles

[Ryan Schmidt]

On May 17, 2007, at 06:00, Ian Eiloart wrote:

> On 16 May 2007 17:12:10 -0700 James Berry wrote:
>
>> Following discussion with several of you, and more thought, my  
>> thinking
>> is now:
>>
>> 	(1) Obfuscate plain text email addresses by using the form:
>>
>> 		- tld/domain/username
>> 			user at bar.com ==> com/bar/user
>>
>> 		- if there are multiple components in the hostname, only the dot  
>> before
>> the tld is turned into a slash:
>> 			user at foo.bar.com ==> com/foo.bar/user
>
> This won't always work (at least, not with simple implementations),  
> since a slash is legal in an email local part (though often banned  
> by local policy). However, if you used "subdomain.tld/localpart"  
> you'd be OK, since the first slash would always be the separator.

I'm also concerned that this looks silly/weird for people whose email  
addresses are at CCTLDs where the last two components of the email  
address usually "go together". For example, if your email address is  
at "mail.example.edu", then it's somewhat ok to encode this as "edu/ 
mail.example", since "mail.example" is the part that the school has  
control over while "edu" is the part they don't control. However, in  
the case of Ian, encoding "sussex.ac.uk" as "uk/sussex.ac" makes less  
sense/looks more strange, since "ac.uk" goes together (is the UK  
equivalent of "edu").

So I would be in favor of changing user.name at mail.example.com into  
mail.example.com/user.name. Or com.example.mail%user.name. Or  
something. But in any case making it clear (to both people and  
machines) which part is the local part and which part is the domain  
part (which as Ian said is not possible when you use multiple  
encoding characters to split the domain part into multiple parts).