update the feature plan!

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Tuesday 20 January 2009, Alexander Neundorf wrote:
> On Tuesday 20 January 2009, Ingo Klöcker wrote:
> ...
>
> > FWIW, KMail automatically converts "foo at bar dot baz" to the
> > corresponding email address, if you paste this string in the address
> > field. OTOH, "foo () bar ! baz" is not known to KMail.
>
> I wonder sometimes whether these email address harvester (correct term ?)
> are not also intelligent enough in the meantime to recognize this kind of
> obfuscated email addresses ?

probably simple economics: if the harvesters as they already exist are 
successfully harvesting large enough #s of accounts, why invest further in 
improving them?

i imagine that obfuscation will only start to fail when:

* enough people obfuscate their emails, degrading the performance of the 
harvesters to the point that getting obfuscated mails becomes needed to "break 
even"

* enough people obfuscate their emails, creating a market of email addresses 
untouched by today's harvesters (opportunity)

* somone gets really ambitious and wants Every Damn Email On The Internet.

until obfuscation represents a large enough % of the emails available on the 
internet, though, i don't think the incentives are there to improve the 
harvesters.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Software

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