[P1] Email name

[Mike Beede]

> ...or, I'm thinking of a trick I saw a guy use as a password, where he 
> interposed a non-ASCII character, like OPT+SHFT+8 or °.
> That would seem to be harder for an automatic address generator to 
> come up with?
> And maybe harder to grab? Or am I kidding myself?

non-ASCII characters won't work in an email address.*  I think the
best solution is some kind of spam-catching software.  My ISP
used to run Spam Assassin until it got too CPU-intensive for them.
Now they contract with Postini.  They do a fabulous job catching
spam, especially the bazillion M$ virus mailings (last I checked
I was getting around 500 a week).

There are packages you can run right on your Mac, but it's
better to filter it on the ISP end so you don't have to download
it first.

Good luck.

	Mike Beede

*As near as I can tell, they're not specifically disallowed, but
the chances that some system along the way wouldn't deal with them
correctly are high.  You're supposed to be able to place the local
name in double-quotes, e.g., "I'm An Address"@mac.com.  It is
still possible that a given mailer or MTA won't work with this.  If
the mac.com software will accept the address, you could give it a
try.  Just putting in spaces might hose much of the spam collecting
software.  If you're interested in reading what mail messages
including addresses are supposed to look like, you can check out
RFC 822 at <http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc822.html>.  Messages with
attachments are defined elsewhere.