235580 - When entering E-mail addresses in form "user at blah.com" to obscure spam bots

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, enhancement)

Description

[Robert Rothenberg]

User-Agent:       
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113

Basically, when one types or pastes an address into To:, CC: etc. fields that
does not contain an @ sign, mozilla auto-fills in the "@whatever.com" for the
identity you are sending mail from.  It would be nice to disable this feature.

On a related note, a lot of web sites are obscuring addresses to keep address
harvesters from getting them. Often in forms "user @ domain.com", or "user at
domain.com", or even "user{at}domain.com" etc.

So the default behavior of Mozilla is when I want to E-mail such a person, I cut
and paste address an Mozilla turns it into "user at [e-mail]".
That's really annoying.

It would be nice if Mozilla could recognize most common formats for obscuring
addresses. (Usually a space or some kind of parens separating at sign, and maybe
at sign is written as "at".)





Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Selet text "foo(at)mydomain.com" (between the quotes)
2. Create a new mail message
3. Paste into To: field

Actual Results:  
4. Mozilla default behavior is to append @+ some domain.

Expected Results:  
Either Mozilla does nothing, or it recognizes that it's an obscured address and
changes it.  Or gives me an option to change it (maybe a drop down that shows
the appended @domain.com or changed address, the same way URL fill-ins work)

Comment 1

[Max Alekseyev]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 93453 ***

Comment 2

[Robert Rothenberg]

This bug is NOT a duplicate of 93453!!! It is requesting a feature to handle a
different type of E-mail address!

Comment 3

[Max Alekseyev]

There are *SO MANY* different ways to obscure e-mail address that supporting
just one of them makes no sense. Moreover, as soon as some way of obscuration
became too popular, e-mail harvesters just "learn" it. So this feature request
contradicts to the concept of obscuration.

Comment 4

[Robert Rothenberg]

(In reply to comment #3)
> There are *SO MANY* different ways to obscure e-mail address that supporting
> just one of them makes no sense.

A good point, but most are easily parsable, something
like

 open at-sym close

 open   = null | space | ( | [ | {
 at-sym = @ | at
 close  = null | space | ) | ] | }

That would cover most of them.

And I'm not sure that it's worth spammers trying to parse these, since most
addresses aren't obscured and it's not worth their effort.  Maybe that will change.

This might make better sense as a plug-in.
  

Comment 5

[Kelley Cook]

*** This bug has been confirmed by popular vote. ***

Comment 6

[Robert Kaiser]

MASS-CHANGE:
This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but has been without a comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project. This means that it was logged against the old Mozilla suite and we cannot determine that it's still valid for the current SeaMonkey suite. Because of this, we are setting it to an UNCONFIRMED state.

If you can confirm that this report still applies to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it back to the NEW state along with a comment on how you reproduced it on what Build ID, or if it's an enhancement request, why it's still worth implementing and in what way.
If you can confirm that the report doesn't apply to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it to the appropriate RESOLVED state (WORKSFORME, INVALID, WONTFIX, or similar).
If no action happens within the next few months, we move this bug report to an EXPIRED state.

Query tag for this change: mass-UNCONFIRM-20090614

Comment 7

[Robert Kaiser]

MASS-CHANGE:
This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but still has no comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project 5 years ago.

Because of this, we're resolving the bug as EXPIRED.

If you still can reproduce the bug on SeaMonkey 2 or otherwise think it's still valid, please REOPEN it and if it is a platform or toolkit issue, move it to the according component.

Query tag for this change: EXPIRED-20100420