Giving out e-mail addresses

[Former Member]

Hi,

I thought of something the other day which could be rather good.

One of the concerns I have with the forums is that if I want to have a private e-mail or IM with a forum member I have to paste my e-mail or IM address into the forum posting, asking the other person to contact me.

This allows any other SDM member to read/use my address details. Normally I wouldn't expose those details.

How about an option to add another user to a list of people approved by me to see my private details (e-mail, IM etc).

This way I can give access to certain individuals to see my details. Even better if I could specify the period they could see the details for.

The other user would then be able to look in their "address book" and see the names, and e-mails of all the users they are currently approved to see.

How about that for a good idea?

Ed

[Former Member]

And I always thought that developers liked a challenge. Sounds like something that could be "knocked up" on a Friday evening with nothing more than a simple computer and a case of beer

Actually I'm glad to say that my address is not over the internet. That is probably why I hardly get any spam.

If possible I like to keep it to myself.

From the hermit.

[Former Member]

I can understand that, Mark for example opened a G-Mail account to be able to give out here so if SPAM starts coming big time he will just change it.

Myself I've been on the WWW since it started to become wide used back in the early 90's and on BBSs before that so I've just gotten used to it

I use SPAM filters though and it helps a lot

[Former Member]

Hi Ed,

If you don't wish to post your email ID in a public forum, then that's okay. But hopefully, somebody else might not really have a problem exposing their email ID. So, you can always write a mail to the person that you want to contact. He/she will get your email-ID from that.

Does that make some sense ?

Regards,

Anand Mandalika.

[eddy_declercq]

There are a lot of easy to implement ways to prevent harvesting on the SDN side. I still need to elaborate on that in an article I've promised in my weblog (/people/eddy.declercq/blog/2005/03/17/mr-spamman-don146t-bring-me-a-dream). But I don't find the time for it.

Meanwhile, SDN could maybe implement the honeypot, which I wrote a BSP port for. That would be my entry for the Challenge

Btw I've send in a Teched proposal concerning all this. So if like the subject, you know what to do when the voting is open

[ennowulff]

Hi Ed,

Not giving out email-Addresses makes it hard for people to contact you... :--->

i'd like to thank you for the perfect report "direct download" and i would like to publish it/ the download-link on my german website.

Thank you for a short response.

Greetz,

Enno

[Former Member]

SDN has made several changes since then and inside of the Business Card of each user they have the chance of displaying the email address (SPAM protected).

If you have found a link here on SDN and would like to add it to your website you are more then welcome, we simply ask that you add the full link to the original SDN content.

[Former Member]

Sounds like a lot of work you are asking of the poor developers on SDN.

Interesting idea but for myself I've not got a problem with people seeing my email address, I'm found easily enough on the internet anyway.