annathepiper | This vexes me. I'm terribly vexed.

So last night I deleted five megs of SoBig worm mail out of my spamassassin folder. This was before I went to bed around 2. I just got up to find that another five megs had rolled in while I was asleep. This, coupled with the fact that just before this damned worm hit I was having spammers forge my address on spam with increasing frequency, is starting to piss me off enough that I am about two seconds away from changing email addresses. I have had my current one for years, but this is especially unacceptable to me right now given that I can still only type decently with one hand and everything on the computer takes longer... and I am taking way too much time getting rid of the stupid spam.

My only question becomes what to change my address to.

[Poll #172054]

Current Mood: irritated

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

tinlail.livejournal.com

The new rule for spam proof address is mixed case, with number and non-alphanumeric charactes.

!#Joe4423@spoof.com

From:

janne.livejournal.com

I tend to assume that any email addy with many numbers in it is spam, myself. Looks computer-generated rather than chosen by a human, that way. Hmm....

From:

wrog

User names are not / cannot be case sensitive; too much mail/mail-related software ignores/translates case in user names.

Nor can you use ! which refers to the UUCP network;
even if nobody uses that anymore there are still lots of old sendmail.cfs out there,

Similar story for % which was the all-purpose other-network-@ character (usually CSNET).

# is probably out, too, but I forget why

$ may be technically legal, but will confuse the shit out of any badly written rulebased rewrite thingie that uses $ for macro names (like sendmail).

In fact, pretty much any non-alphanumeric other than . or _ is suspect. And technically . isn't really part of the user name (RFC822 allows domain syntax on the user side of the @) and so may turn out to be confusing for other reasons.