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A comment on Gravatars: why publishing your email's hash is not a good idea. Parent comment

Re:Gravatars: why publishing your email's hash is not a good... by ChadB on Wednesday December 16, 2009 @01:56AM (#998266)
The big problem with that is that you'd have to use the same

  really_long_random_string
to register for every gravatar-enabled site you want to register for.

The only benefit I can see of this is that you could easily blacklist emails destined for that address.

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Re:Gravatars: why publishing your email's hash is not a good... by pyre on Wednesday December 16, 2009 @02:19AM (#998286)
Doesn't have to be a really long and random string. Just has to be something that can't be easily deduced from your name and/or username. This might not defeat rainbow tables, but I think there are probably easier ways to harvest email addresses than to generate rainbow tables and troll for gravatar URLs.
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