SPAM

[Timothy Miller]

>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.

I never knew Google had the capacity to do this sort of thing. It's 
really troubling. I always thought an email list was equivalent to 
private email sent from one person to a bunch of others. Apparently 
it's not.

I won't ask you to explain. It's too far off topic. I don't know what 
gmane is either. But thanks for letting me know. Maybe I'll 
understand it someday.

TM