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There's an older trick that still works for me: a passphrase in the subject line. You can even include the passphrase in the mailto: uri. E-mail harvesters us
by finnw 15y ago
There's an older trick that still works for me: a passphrase in the subject line.
You can even include the passphrase in the mailto: uri. E-mail harvesters usually discard it, but a user who clicks the link (e.g. to compose a message in Thunderbird) will have their subject field populated.
Now set up procmail to redirect messages to /dev/null if the passphrase is not present. Now you can freely post the uri all over the web.
Real example:
mailto:aoxomoxoa@finnw.me.uk?subject=Don%22t+buy+this
(I'm confident that no spammer will send bulk messages with "Don't buy this" in the subject line, so that makes a good default passphrase.)
- kijin 15y agoI know someone who always changes the subject line to reflect the content. He even changes the subject line when responding to other people's e-mails, which is quite annoying because it often breaks Gmail conversations. So you'll have to take some measure to tell people not to delete that passphrase from the subject line. For example, "Don't change or delete this or it will go into my spam box." But that's verbose.
- finnw 15y agoIf I send a reply, it comes from a different address (which is not published and is unaffected by the procmail recipe)