-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- On Sun, 16 Feb 1997, camcc@abraxis.com (Alec) wrote:

:> I put a spam-busted address in my .sig and give root@127.0.0.1 as my email :> in the from: header. Sure, somebody out there is going to be unhappy with :> me, but if they have a clue they'll figure it out. Meantime, the SpamBots :> are bouncing mail to the admin of the site instead of to me. : For the less computer articulate (me), please rephrase what you just said more in the form of basic instructions.

For starters, root is the all-powerful system administrator account on UNIX machines, and 127.0.0.1 is the "loopback" or "localhost" IP address, generally used for testing. A connection to loopback amounts to a software connection back to the originating host, and e-mail sent to loopback won't even go out the Ethernet card / modem / whatever. So, if I put root@127.0.0.1 in the "From:" field of my news reader's configuration, all of my posts will give this as my e-mail address. Depending on the news reader, I may have to set options like "override default domain name", which would override my service provider's name. Since many commercial mailer programs ("SpamBots") scan Usenet news posts for potential target e-mail addresses, these programs will pick up my phony e-mail address and send their junk to their own system administrator instead of me :-) The smarter programs will also scan the bottom of posts for e-mail addresses in people's signatures (or .sig files). The "spam-busted" address described above could be anything that is not a verbatim copy of my e-mail address, for example: c.y.n.t.h.b@i.o.s.p.h.e.r.e.dot.n.e.t cynthb[at]iosphere.net cynthb@[NOSPAM].iosphere.net Any reasonably computer-literate human will be able to figure out what my real address is, but a cut-and-paste by a software robot won't work. Hope this helps, Cynthia -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3ia Charset: cp850 iQCVAwUBMwfYOZOg7xGCJGQtAQFysQP/VBvuOqZnuQd/1PKz2eApuKUFhUSqWcMe L0W44yFEhMF/vsSz9cZ1fY6ge72Mc1M6UaFPW109rkrmlT9Y0rytelmE+IVr5U92 Q0b+5t/SZAs2HTX8brF6XnqY+1kCcQCv20Yv1dUyWrHM/MOe6RUObSSS2uxqC7tf r4TWCnQ6y7c= =bet0 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- =============================================================== Cynthia H. Brown, P.Eng. E-mail: cynthb@iosphere.net | PGP Key: See Home Page Home Page: http://www.iosphere.net/~cynthb/ Junk mail will be ignored in the order in which it is received. Klein bottle for rent; enquire within.