> > I will reiterate that security through obscurity is silly, but here > > you go. :-) > > Well, it's not really about "security", so the statement doesn't really > fit. Agreed, it's about privacy. Really what you need to ask yourself is what is what is the minimum amount of user info you need to post to still keep the stats meaningful. Then only post that amount of user info. If only the name portion of the email address suffices, then you only post that (of course you still use the full email address for sorting/stats calculation). As someone suggested, perhaps just the name portion of the email, replace the @ sign with the word no, then the domain portion of the email without TLD (so jjrbouchernogmail for mine). So even a smart bot crawling the net that looks for known domain names (gmail, hotmail, yahoo, etc) will not properly interpret the name portion of the email address unless they figure out that @ was replaced with no. I know it's easy for us to criticize from the sidelines. But it is our personal information that is being aggregated (outside of what the mailing list does therefore not something one expected when signing up, despite recognizing that the capability existed to do that) so we are entitled to express an opinion, especially seeing you are soliciting it. Of course anyone could do that and post it without ever consulting the list members (thankfully that is not what you are doing). But that would not make one a good member of a list community to do that. And from the feedback we've seen from at least a few, it could cause some to unsubscribe (at least until they went out and got another email address specifically for the list only with a whitelist rule to only accept emails from the mailing list). Jacques B.
