Yikes! E-mail harvesting possibility?

[Heather Williams]

Greetings!

If I can snip and match a few different posts on this issue:

> Might want to check out The Mail Archive, a free archiving service
> used by some other listservs I subscribe to. It obfuscates any
> embedded emails, whether in signatures or in headers or in the text of
> the emails. Not sure how they manage this, but it's a great way of
> making the list archives pubicly available and still protected.


Thanks Mark, I'll look into it.

>> It is perfectly reasonable to communicate with individuals
>> via the list.  If the RR list moderators could remove
>> e-mail addresses from the digests I belive they would do us
>> all a favour.
> 
> Perhaps, but sometimes on-list conversations become off-list ones, and
> in order for someone to email someone off-list, they need to know what
> the person's email address is. If there is a direct connection between
> the email addresses on the list and an increase in spam, I'd agree with
> you, but until that is proven, I think it is beneficial to have the
> email addresses in the digest.

The consensus on that very quickly became clear. The benefit of having non
anonymous posts far outweighs the spam risk for most people.

> Apart from the harvesting aspect there is the simple fact
> that the e-mail digests contain all the e-mail addresses of
> the contributors.  So far I have not been able to identify
> any of the piles of SPAM I seem to get as originating from
> somebody having subscribed to the e-mail digest - but any
> SPAMMER must be incredibly stupid if they don't see this
> possibility.

Yes, but to take advantage of these email addresses, the would be spammer
first has to subscribe to the list. That's why this is a double opt in list.
It protects you from the vast majority of spammers, because they are robots,
not people.

Spam is a problem. I say this as one who gets vast quantities of the stuff
every day. But to let it diminish the value of our legitimate activities is
to let it win! Spam filters, the delete button, and a philosophical attitude
are my current preferred weapons in the war against spam.

I think for the moment, if the spam risk really worries you, you should mung
your email address in some way so that it won't get quoted in usable form.
We will continue to look at other possible solutions that don't diminish the
value of the list.

Regards,

Heather

-- 
Heather Williams <heather at runrev.com> <http://www.runrev.com/>
Runtime Revolution Ltd.
Tel: +44 (0) 131 7184333 Fax: +44 (0)1639 830707
Revolution: Software at the Speed of Thought