[Tfug] Re: ISP for Qwest DSL

[Leo Przybylski]

Anthony Steckman wrote:

>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.
>
Doesn't TFUG use mailman? I would hate to rain on your parade, but I 
could quite easily (with procmail, bash and sendmail), start spamming 
people on this mailing list. There are ways to protect against this with 
sendmail, but I won't go into that.

In a modular sense, it would be simple to integrate this functionality 
into a crawling system.

Speaking of crawling, isn't it also possible to crawl mailing-list 
archives available through good ole' HTTP?

I don't mean to boast, and this may not really prove anything by me 
saying it, but I used to write crawling software for spammers (much to 
my shame). I maintain a personal database of domestic/international 
email addresses (I'm sure you're on it somewhere).

I'm with the AOL QA person. I also used to write software for profiling 
over network protocols. I'm sure that if you have visited any of the 
clients from http://www.coremetrics.com, you have been tagged and are 
tracked throughout the world of HTTP. If you have ever seen an XXX 
banner (now, I would never stoop that low, but they are the competition 
for legitimate businesses) or email, you again are tagged.

Spam isn't all you have to worry about. Be sure to turn your cookies off 
even in your email viewer.

-Leo
P.S. By "you", I wasn't referring to any specific individual. I mean 
anyone reading this on the list.

>
>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.
>. 
>. _______________________________________________
>. tfug mailing list
>. tfug@tfug.org
>. http://www.tfug.org/mailman/listinfo/tfug
>. 
>. 
>
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