Robert wrote:
(snips)

> Anything important, particularly to do with the NedFest, please send to
> my other mailbox address.  The following bit of circumlocution is
> designed to evade robots looking for spam addresses (I believe that
> this list is still archived somewhere, so scannable.)

It is:

http://raven.utc.edu/archives/scuba-se.html

> The first part
> of the email address is "rdelfs".  Then there's the universal locator
> symbol pronounced "at".  Then  the domain "tabula-international.com>.

However your sig includes the above address in full, including the "@" symbol.

There is a list I belong to which specifically asks that you do not
quote e-mail addresses when replying, or, if you do, that you do so as
you have demonstrated above. According to them _at_ instead of @ is
pretty well universally known, therefore recommended. I'm quite sure
that the robots/spiders will be made cleverer to overcome this sleight
of hand "real soon now" if they have not already done so.

The issue of Spam, and for that matter, viruses is now really
significant. I rely on the fact that I use a Mac (and strong
anti-virus protection religiously updated) to, as best I am able,
protect me from viruses (the vast majority of which cannot affect a
Mac) but in spite of the best efforts of my ISP (and my filters),
today for example I got some seventy odd messages of which some seven
were legitimate. Most of the Spam messages were flogging questionable
medicines, followed by porn, followed by unscrupulous anti Virus
purveyors advising that they had "killed" a virus message on its way
to me, thus hoping that poor little naive me might buy their product
(which mostly don't work on a Mac anyway).

A year ago I got virtually no Spam messages.

I guess we're going to have to live with it until some genius geek
thinks of a way around it, until these idiots get around that one as
well and the cycle restarts.

Ahhh, if only there weren't so many idiots around who WILL click on it
when a total stranger asks them to "click here", who actually believe
these false medicine messages, who believe the Nigerians asking them
to help with the passage of multi millions of dollars, who believe the
phishers who ask them to divulge their passwords etc for their bank
accounts, in the clear, over the Internet.

Naivety is alive, thriving, and living on the Internet.

Cheers,

Christian