http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=697974


in reply to contact details

Just remember, there are such things as dictionary attacks. I wrote a brute force walker through ('A' .. 'Z', 'a' .. 'z', 0 .. 9) generating all 5 letter names. It took 238 seconds starting from AAAAA to get to PugSA.

Sending out email is certainly slower, although a botnet of 50000 zombies gives you a certain amount of parallelism. Sooner or later you're going to receive spam, whether your address is "published" or not.

Oh wait, SMTP address are case-insensitive... make that 27 seconds.

• another intruder with the mooring in the heart of the Perl

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Re^2: contact details
by kyle (Abbot) on Jul 16, 2008 at 14:55 UTC

    The local part of an email address (i.e., the "PugSA" in "PugSA@example.com") is case sensitive. This is specified in RFC 2821. It's a good idea not to treat your local addresses case sensitively, but it's a bad idea to assume a remote system is not case sensitive until you know otherwise.

      True, though the spec also mentions that:
      . . . exploiting the case sensitivity of mailbox local-parts impedes interoperability and is discouraged.