email addressing

I've seen a numer of people who are able to 'mask' their actual email
addresses in these groups (presumably for avoiding spam,etc). I have
tried to do this in Pan and in my email, but the app then tells me that I
don't have a proper email address for sending posts and emails. Can
anyone tell me how this is done?

Apparently, there aren't any Linux administrators who know what this is or
how to accomplish it...

On Fri, 02 Jul 2004 15:50:41 +0000, Me wrote:

> I've seen a numer of people who are able to 'mask' their actual email
> addresses in these groups (presumably for avoiding spam,etc). I have
> tried to do this in Pan and in my email, but the app then tells me that I
> don't have a proper email address for sending posts and emails. Can
> anyone tell me how this is done?

On Mon, 05 Jul 2004 20:11:30 GMT, Me wrote:
> Apparently, there aren't any Linux administrators who know what this is or
> how to accomplish it...

Maybe they use different tools instead of your setup.

Since I use slrn for text reading and Thunderbird for email I could
not answer your question.

I sure as H*11 do not browse the net with the same account I read email
with. I have no desire for a web page/html script to snarf my email
address or whatever.

I create seperate accounts for web browsing, credit card use, and a
seperate account for each email account so that none of the accounts
know about the other.

All browser account's .bash_logout deletes the account's files and tars
in a pristine setup.

Bit~
I use about 5 different email accounts for different things as well (I run
two different companies, and have personal email accounts at both
offices, and my home office), and I do have the odd yahoo
correspondence, as well as 2 others for online purchases. What I was
trying to describe here was the case where the author of an email is
'ABCMAN', and the email address is something like 'DIEATONCEDOTNOW'. If
I try to setup parameters like this for newsgroups, I can't even get
past the news server, since that's not even a valid address of any kind.
Being a bit new to all of this, it's hard to know even where to look for
some of these things.

Thanks for the reply. I appreciate knowledgable feedback.

Regards

On Mon, 05 Jul
2004 21:15:27 +0000, Bit Twister wrote:

> On Mon, 05 Jul 2004 20:11:30 GMT, Me wrote:
>> Apparently, there aren't any Linux administrators who know what this is or
>> how to accomplish it...
>
> Maybe they use different tools instead of your setup.
>
> Since I use slrn for text reading and Thunderbird for email I could
> not answer your question.
>
> I sure as H*11 do not browse the net with the same account I read email
> with. I have no desire for a web page/html script to snarf my email
> address or whatever.
>
> I create seperate accounts for web browsing, credit card use, and a
> seperate account for each email account so that none of the accounts
> know about the other.
>
> All browser account's .bash_logout deletes the account's files and tars
> in a pristine setup.

Me said the following, on 07/06/04 02:47:
> Bit~
> I use about 5 different email accounts for different things as well (I run
> two different companies, and have personal email accounts at both
> offices, and my home office), and I do have the odd yahoo
> correspondence, as well as 2 others for online purchases. What I was
> trying to describe here was the case where the author of an email is
> 'ABCMAN', and the email address is something like 'DIEATONCEDOTNOW'. If
> I try to setup parameters like this for newsgroups, I can't even get
> past the news server, since that's not even a valid address of any kind.
> Being a bit new to all of this, it's hard to know even where to look for
> some of these things.
>
> Thanks for the reply. I appreciate knowledgable feedback.
>
> Regards
>
> On Mon, 05 Jul
> 2004 21:15:27 +0000, Bit Twister wrote:
>
>
>>On Mon, 05 Jul 2004 20:11:30 GMT, Me wrote:
>>
>>>Apparently, there aren't any Linux administrators who know what this is or
>>>how to accomplish it...
>>
>>Maybe they use different tools instead of your setup.
>>

I saw your original message, and didn't reply since I wasn't sure what
your question was, and didn't have time to try to figure it out. It's
to your advantage to try to be as clear as possible, at least if you
want an answer.

Now that I've read more, I think I know what you're asking. Your news
reader and/or news server probably wants something in the 'From:' header
that looks like (w/r/t syntax) a valid e-mail address. In other words,
it probably wants something that fits the <name>@<domain-name> pattern.
(You can look at the headers of this post for an example.) Although
it is _possible_ that a server might try to verify that a given address
is actually valid, I have never run across one that does that.

What you put in your .sig is entirely up to you. I have not found that
I get much spam on this address, despite having an unmasked address in
my sig.

There is a FAQ that deals with this subject at:
<http://www.faqs.org/faqs/net-abuse-faq/munging-address/>

(BTW, the convention on USENET is to avoid top-posting, in order to make
discussions easier to follow.)

--
Rich Gibbs
rgibbs@alumni.princeton.edu

On Tue, 06 Jul 2004 06:47:59 GMT, Me wrote:
> Bit~
> I use about 5 different email accounts for different things as well (I run
> two different companies, and have personal email accounts at both
> offices, and my home office), and I do have the odd yahoo
> correspondence, as well as 2 others for online purchases.

I'm assuming you missed my point. If I have a yahoo email address,
I create a linux account with the same name. Work email address, I
have a linux user account. So when I want to read yahoo email, I log
into the linux account, bring up yahoo and log into the yahoo email account.
I created desktop icons to get to where I want to go.

> What I was
> trying to describe here was the case where the author of an email is
> 'ABCMAN', and the email address is something like 'DIEATONCEDOTNOW'. If
> I try to setup parameters like this for newsgroups, I can't even get
> past the news server, since that's not even a valid address of any kind.

Yes, I understand. I tried Pan on two different release and gave up on it.
Since it have problems I never bothered to look into it any farther.

Guessing pan is searving as a news reader and an email reader.
Munge you emai addy for UseNet usage and yes you cannot fetch your email.

The programmer used the convention of supplying your email
address as input for the From field in UseNet articles.
This was before spammers started scraping email addresses from UseNet
headers and the users need to munge the address.

Solutions:
o Seperate login accounts for each activity.

o Seperate configurations for each activity.
You would build a script to link your pan subdirectory to
which activity you plan to use. You would set up pan for email,
exit, and mv .pan to .pan_email
setup pan for news reading, exit, mv .pan .pan_usenet
now a script could rm ~/.pan, ln -s .pan_usenet .pan when you want
news and do a ln -s .pan_email .pan when you want email.

http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/index.html to understand bash scripting.


> Being a bit new to all of this, it's hard to know even where to look for
> some of these things.

I try
man prog_name_here
info prog_name_here
locate -i prog_name_here | grep -i doc/
if locate returns something like
/usr/share/doc/pan-0.14.2.91/README
I cut/paste it into my browser.
if it returns something like
/usr/share/doc/HTML/en/kcontrol/panel/index.docbook
then I start looking in the dexktop manager's help tool.

> Thanks for the reply. I appreciate knowledgable feedback.

The subtle suggestion was to use seperate tools to get the job done. :)

You could use Mozilla or Thunderbird as a gui news or email reader and
configure one to have your junk email addy for Usenet posts.