Dear Boosters What follows is OT, but since this post discusses a problem that I expect to hit boost contributors especially hard I think it is ok to post it here. If not, please let me know. **** lengthy obfuscation rationale begin **** Spammers routinely harvest email addresses from web pages and newsgroups. Viruses scan harddisks to find email addresses of potential new victims. Spammers have even started to use special viruses to install backdoors on computers and then later hijack the infected machines to send their junk to the email addresses found on the harddisk (see e.g. http://tinyurl.com/35usd). Boost contributors are especially vulnerable as their email address is published on the boost website and on the boost list. Moreover, their email address can be found on the harddisks of the thousands of people who use the boost distribution. Despite these vulnerabilities, very few obfuscate their address on the list and in the 1.31 distribution (I don't do so yet, either). Sure, virus scanners and spam filters alleviate the problem but they can never fully solve it. Spammers have become very sophisticated in making their junk pass filters. Although I'm employing multiple spam/virus filters (spamcop, gmx, yahoo) I'm currently getting about 10 unsolicited messages per day (up from about 3 per day a year ago) and I'm concerned what will happen once my address is stored on thousands of hard drives when/if my library is accepted into boost. Sure, I could simply disable my throw-away address and publish a new one as soon as spam/virus levels become unbearable but that also immediately cuts off users who have downloaded the distribution. Plus, this solves the problem only temporarily. So, the only real solution to considerably reduce email junk is to thwart automatic harvest and thus to obfuscate email addresses. I realize that even this offers no guarantee for not receiving spam/viruses as someone sending me email will often have my unobfuscated email address on his/her hard drive but it definitely reduces the number of locations where my address can be harvested considerably. **** lengthy obfuscation rationale end **** Questions: 1. How do other contributors deal with spam/viruses clogging up their in-boxes? Am I worrying about something that will never be a big deal? 2. What do other people think about a voluntary boost standard for obfuscating email addresses published in posts, docs & code? 3. If you think 2. is a good idea then what is a good way to obfuscate email addresses? Is the simple <at> & <dot> approach sufficient or do we need something that is less common (and thus prone to automation)? E.g. WHATah2003EVER@gmx.net with a remark to remove all capital letters? Regards, Andreas