According to a quick search of groups.google.com, I’ve been using the same email address for almost exactly 9 years now and in that time I’ve never succumbed to the temptation to monkey with my mail headers and start hiding my obscured email address down in my sigfile beneath a sign saying ‘Beware of the leopard’.

Why? Because, if someone wants to respond to something I’ve said, it seems to be the height of rudeness to expect them to do anything other than simply hit the reply button of their mail client – generally people (well me for certain, I can’t be sure about everyone else) don’t bother.

But there’s something worse (apart from the spammers who cause the problem in the first place) than the invalid ‘From’ header.