[Tfug] Re: ISP for Qwest DSL

Mon Jan 20 20:06:02 2003

I meant with mailto tags. 

Anyway, it does look like crawlers have taken a step or two forward 
since I last read about it but it doesn't change my personal experience:

Of four non-AOL email accounts that I use, only one receives any spam -- 
and it's an old Yahoo! account that used to have web links pointing to 
it (I don't actively use it anymore so didn't include it in my original 
count).

The one AOL address I have that gets any SPAM began to get SPAM the day 
after I posted to one of the Beta boards. The SPAM continues to this 
day, even though that address has never been posted anywhere else on the 
Internet.

I don't say that to disparage AOL, and I concede that I know others who 
are (or claim to be) equally careful with their email addresses who 
receive more SPAM than I.

Regardless of whatever else has been said, though, I still don't believe 
it was fair to imply that by joining this Listserv one would eventually 
begin to receive SPAM email. All three of the addresses mentioned in 
this post have been used on this list at one time or another -- and, 
again, I've yet to receive a single piece of SPAM email at any of these 
addresses (to be fair, fastmail.fm does filter -- but, to the best of my 
knowledge, the other two addresses go unfiltered and unspammed).

As a side note: many of the Internet message boards these days don't 
even directly associate with your email address -- you get a username 
specific to that board and usually disclosure of your real email address 
is optional.

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

. Date: Mon, 20 Jan 2003 14:39:52 -0700 (MST)
. Subject: Re: [Tfug] Re: ISP for Qwest DSL
. From: Sam Hart <hart@physics.arizona.edu>
. Reply-To: tfug@tfug.org
. To: tfug@tfug.org
. 
. > 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>
. end
. 
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