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  • From: David Kowis <dkowis AT shlrm.org>
  • To: sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Discuss] E-mail address hiding service
  • Date: Wed, 15 Apr 2015 18:09:10 -0500



On 04/15/2015 10:58 AM, Vlad Glagolev wrote:
> Hello all!
>
> As I told earlier[0], we have a huge spam traffic to our distro mail
> addresses. Personally I get like 80-100 spam e-mails daily, especially
> recently (maybe 2 or 3 weeks), which is *not* good. And our filtering
> system seems to be non-existent, really.

We don't have any filtering system, since it's just a direct alias.
Having your own statistical filtering system would probably solve the
entire problem.

The next generation of the email system will not just be a forwarding
service, but instead be a staging pop on demand, so you have to request
your mail, or it gets deleted after 30 days or something. I don't know
if there will be statistcal spam filtration built in or not.

>
> I've decided to write a tiny service I mentioned in the previous mail
> in February. And here it is.
>
> I'm pleased to introduce the MAGE[1]: Mail Address GEneration service.
> *sigh*
>
> It does the following:
>
> 1. Gets a query string containing base64-encoded data
> 2. Checks for its length (currently max size is 100 chars)
> 3. Decodes it
> 4. If everything's fine, it generates an RGB image in PNG representing
> original e-mail address according to the website's style[1].

I'm not a huge fan of this, since you cannot copy/paste email
addresses... But I don't have a spam problem despite being on plenty of
public emails. I do get probably in the realm of 400+ a day some times,
but that's why I have crm114.

>
> There are several cases when it's not possible to generate a picture:
> - wrong base64 data: decoding error is returned
> - some internal error occured if rendering is not possible: rendering
> error is returned (which is a simple pre-rendered error.png file
> sitting on fs)
> - wrong or no data is provided (i.e. GET /): usage message is returned
>
> I've converted our Developers page[3] as an example.
> It uses :Mage: alias[4] for that, so you can simply use this string:
>
> {{:Mage:...}}
>
> to insert the image somewhere on the site.
>
> And the string generation is pretty simple, too:
>
> $ printf "%s\n" `echo -n user AT domain.tld | base64 -w0`
> (or whatever way you prefer)
>
> The only issue I see here is the problem of displaying these addresses
> in text browsers like lynx, but how many such visitors do we have?
>
> The service is a bit more than 1.5KB of Python code and actually is a
> pure WSGI application. The only dependencies are:
>
> - flup[5]
> - pil[6] or pillow[7] (PIL is used on the server atm, but that will
> switch to Pillow on the next upgrade)
> - DejaVu fonts (dejavu-ttf spell) -- DejaVuSans-Bold.ttf is used here
> - freetype2 (sure, how would you work with truetype another way?)
>
> Special notes:
> - speedy C version of StringIO (cStringIO) is used
> - Cache-Control header for one hour is applied on the server
>
> And finally: I really dislike the situation with our abandoned and
> ancient mail system/service and I'm thinking about dropping my distro
> email address in favour of something at one of my own domains if nothing
> will be changed anytime soon.
>
> But well.. any notes, suggestions and questions are welcome.
>
> [0] https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/sm-discuss/2015-February/021885.html
> [1] http://beta.mage.sourcemage.ru/
> [2] http://beta.sourcemage.ru/style.css
> [3] http://beta.sourcemage.ru/Developers
> [4] http://beta.sourcemage.ru/Alias
> [5] http://www.saddi.com/software/flup/
> [6] http://www.pythonware.com/products/pil/
> [7] https://python-pillow.github.io/
>
> --
> Vlad Glagolev <stealth AT tiberian.ru>
>
>
>
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