SPAM

[Mark Wieder]

Timothy-

Thursday, June 30, 2005, 4:16:37 PM, you wrote:

TM> I am not thrilled to hear that. I presumed that my email address
TM> would be relatively safe on this list, because it is open to 
TM> subscribers only. If I had known otherwise, I would have subscribed
TM> with a disposable email address. This one is not particularly 
TM> disposable.

I can say that I've never received a spam email that I can attribute
to this list. I used to be *very* careful about not putting my email
address on postings to any list. I still am on some lists. But several
of my subscribed listservs are archived on gmane and, of course,
indexed by Google and they always have at least a first pass at hiding
email addresses.

Nothing's perfect. There are other problems with our listserv
software, but the obfuscation of email addresses is not one of those.
I extract the email addresses from this list through Google
screenscraping in one of my plugins. It's not hard to do. I'm sure
there's spammer software out there to harvest them.

TM> I doubt that a spammer would take the trouble to subscribe to a 
TM> relatively small list like this. On the other hand, a spammer could
TM> probably figure out how to harvest email addresses from lists 
TM> archived on Google.

TM> Is it really essential to archive the list on Google?

Google does this by itself. It's not a runrev decision.


-- 
-Mark Wieder
 mwieder at ahsoftware.net