[Tfug] Re: ISP for Qwest DSL

[Sam Hart]

> 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.

That's not true, take a look at the email archive for this message and 
you'll see that in your quoting the original poster you've inadvertantly 
(sp?) added their e-mail addy in a web-readable form:

> . 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)

Hey look, I just did it myself! ;-)

Plus, there are some pretty clever spambots out there these days (I 
actually know someone who writes these things for a living). They now can 
correctly glean an email in odd forms like "joe at foo dot com" and 
"joe_DELETE_ME_@foot.com" and things like that.

The unfortunate thing is that, in this day and age, you really can't avoid 
getting spammed. No matter how hard you try, if you use an e-mail addy for 
long enough you will be exposed to some spam harvester of some sort. Just 
do a search on google for your email addy and exclude any websites you 
have direct control over and you'll be amazed at all the unknown places 
you'll turn up (last I checked, my personal addy was on close to 1000 
distinct pages)

And, of course, you do have to realize that even if a list you are on 
obfuscates the addresses, that list could easily be mirrored somewhere 
else that doesn't.

For those who haven't read it (sorry, dunno if this has already been 
posted on this list, I get so much mail that I can't always read every 
message I get from lists ;-) here's an interesting paper on the subject:
http://theory.whirlycott.com/~phil/antispam/rbl-bad/rbl-bad.html

Also, anyone interested in what I personally do to fight spam, you can 
read my blurb here:
http://geekcomix.com/cgi-bin/snh/wiki.pl?SPAM

and you can see the tabulated results for my efforts for the last 6 months 
or so here:
http://geekcomix.com/snh/spam.shtml

-- 
Sam Hart
University/Work addr. <hart@physics.arizona.edu>
Personal addr. <criswell@geekcomix.com>
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