Yikes! E-mail harvesting possibility?

[Mark Wieder]

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.

http://www.mail-archive.com/faq.html

>From the FAQ:

"The Mail Archive utilizes two levels of electronic countermeasures to
prevent spam incidents. First, we explicitly block spam harvesting
robots (spambots) from accessing our server. We deny access, at the
server level, for any software that matches the browser ID of a known
spambot. Our second line of defense is to make sure that the web pages
themselves are spambot resistant. We do not use any unshielded mailto:
hyperlinks, email addresses and we strip out, scramble, or obfuscate
email addresses from message headers and bodies. Yet we still provide
a way for people to reply to an archived message, using their regular
email software. This feat is achieved with a special POST protected
CGI gateway which returns a mailto: URL to the user agent. This
technique is extremely effective in blocking generic spam harvesting
robots; for more information, see Mullane's Spambot Beware guide. The
effectiveness of our spam-blocking preventative measures are monitored
by spambot trap addresses like honeypot at jab.org."

-Mark Wieder