[Tfug] Re: ISP for Qwest DSL

[Anthony Steckman]

Outside of AOL, most message boards and email groups are pretty safe 
from harvesters, who prefer to use crawlers that harvest mailto 
addresses from an html context. Mailman protects against this by not 
posting email addresses in the archives. In other words: the only way 
to get addresses from this Listserv... is to join the Listserv. Most of 
the old-school newsgroup type crawlers fail here because they don't know 
how to reply to the confirmation email.

This isn't to say it couldn't eventually become a problem, but your 
experience with AOL is skewing your perception of what happens on the 
rest of the Internet.

Yahoo! mailing lists also protect one's email address -- again, the only 
way to harvest the address is to join the email groups -- and the 
crawlers in use just aren't smart enough to handle that yet.

Finally, if you really work at AOL, your email to this Listserv is in 
violation of at least three company policies.

All things being the same:

Stick around awhile and you might learn something.


+ I'm probably responding to some of what was said below:

. Date: Wed, 15 Jan 2003 21:08:12 -0700
. Subject: [Tfug] Re: ISP for Qwest DSL
. From: Michele Campbell <omega593@mac.com>
. Reply-To: tfug@tfug.org
. To: tfug@tfug.org
. X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.551)
. 
. 
. I would like to suggest that you consider how your name is getting on 
. the spam lists rather than changing your ISP. Email addresses are 
. harvested from a variety of places, including public forums such as 
. this one. They are also harvested from ebay and yahoo. So you can 
. change ISP's but if your behavior does not change, you will continue to 
. receive spam no matter which company provides your internet service. I 
. work at AOL and we are currently running some tests on Spam filters-- 
. but no filters are perfect. What you must consider is that if your ISP 
. starts filtering, the ISP might inadvertently filter some of your 
. non-Spam email. So, for your own sake, take a look at who is receiving 
. your email address and where your email address is appearing and 
. perhaps limit that exposure.
. 
. L. Michele Campbell
. Associate QA Engineer, America Online, Inc.
. 
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