Klaus Rennecke wrote:
> Brian Mathis wrote:
>> [...]
>> I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that these days, if you are
>> making a public archive of a mailing list, that you munge the
>> addresses. I would actually consider it a requirement. It would
>> be a small additional step that will save everyone a lot of hassle
>> later on.
>> [...]
>
> Well, it's not as such unreasonable, but pretty much useless. There is
> nothing you can do to prevent a spammer to join the mailing list and
> lurk with a bot to harvest addresses. No munging will help there.
>
> So, I don't believe it's worth the effort. It might even be considered
> an added risk, because it would create a false sense of security.
>
> Funny thing is, I didn't get any spam yet - that I know of - on this
> vector. But that's probably just plain lucky :-)
>
> /Klaus
No, it's not at all useless. The effort is very small, and the reward
is great. Spammers use scripts that crawl the web. Finding some web
page with a bunch of addresses takes no work at all on the part of a
spammer. Signing up to a mailing list and then collecting messages
takes infinitely more work, and most if not all spammers won't be doing
that, if they even understand it's possible.
I get over 10,000 spams per day, and most of them go to addresses where
at the time, the list or site was private. Over time, addresses leak
out. The more you can prevent the leaks, the better it will be for you
a few years down the line.
Email archive sites are some of the biggest sources of spam addresses
these days.
--
Brian Mathis
http://directedge.com/b/
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Received on Wed Jul 21 21:17:15 2004