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Re: MFG homepage at www.tug.org

> Ulrik Vieth writes:
>> converter.  A side-effect of this is that all e-mail addresses are
>> marked-up as active hyperlinks.  If you're worried about attracting
>> spam mail this way, I could try to exclude the mail subdirectories
>> from search engines in the robots.txt file.

Frank Mittelbach:
> i would probably prefer not to have my home mail marked up with way
> for exactly that reason. i'm really concerned seeing how many spam's i
> get just by answering sometimes on ctt from my work address and for
> that reason never use my mailbox here for these things

Joerg has already voiced similar concerns about his `good' address 
he uses for mailing lists.  So far I've done three things:

(1) I've regenerated the HTML mail archives with the -nomailto option, 
    thus inhibiting the creation of mailto links.  Unfortunately this 
    doesn't stop the address from appearing as body text.

(2) I've written a sed-script that rewrites some of your more specifc 
    addresses by the generic form 'Firstname.Lastname@uni-mainz.de'.
    Same for your work address.  If you want to have them mangled 
    otherwise, e.g. by inserting `NOSPAM', please let me know.

(3) I've added the /twg/mfg/mail and /twg/mfg/mail-html directories 
    to the disallow list in robots.txt.  Hope this will be enough 
    to stop the well-behaved search engines like AltaVista and such.

Apart from that, I'd say that posting to Usenet is much more prone 
to attract spam mail than putting a mailto link on the WWW.  In our
place, everyone is listed with a mailto link on the institute's
homepage, but only those who regularly post to Usenet complain 
about being spammed.

Cheers, Ulrik.


P.S.  I hope you agree that apart from the spam problem, having
a mail archive is a good thing in general, in case you'll ever
want to find out how some odd decision came about may years ago.