Re: LYNX-DEV IDENT; any way a single user can turn it off?

[Hiram Lester, Jr.]

On Tue, 10 Dec 1996 address@hidden wrote:

> I just discovered, courtesy of the SNOOP link at    www.anonymizer.com,
> that the Lynx at both of my ISPs has IDENT turned on -- any web
> page I visit gets my email address.

Actually, IDENT is a little different.  Ident is a method where the
machine you are on is running an ident daemon and any machine you connect
to that requires ident will query that port to be sure that you aren't
spoofing your IP (and full e-mail address if it's available).  It's
completely seperate from Lynx.

But... you are correct in that Lynx will send your e-mail address if you
have it defined on the Options screen.  It sends the address with every
HTTP request as part of the headers: "From: address@hidden"

> No wonder my junkmail count is rising, at the ISP I Lynx from (Netcom).

It's possible, but from my experience most junkmail still comes from
posting to usenet and other discussion lists.  I've got my e-mail from my
old school forwarded to my new address, and all of the spam I've gotten
has come via that route because I used it to post to usenet groups.
That's also why my address appears in several of the search engines.  I
haven't used my current address for posting to usenet, and haven't seen a
bit of spam come directly to it.

> Any way an individual user can turn this OFF?
> Else I'll ask if they'll offer two different configurations here,
> so people can hide.

Well, as far as I know, it you set no value for the e-mail address on the
Options screen, nothing will be sent.  I'm not sure if anything will be
sent after you use a mailto: URL if you fill in an e-mail address there...

   +------------------------------------+-------------------------------+
   | Hiram W. Lester, Jr.               | E-Mail: address@hidden    |
   | Computer Science                   | Home page:                    |
   | Middle Tennessee State University  |   http://pobox.com/~hwlester/ |
   +------------------------------------+-------------------------------+

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