I noticed that my spam levels (the stuff that got through the gmail filter) shot up within days of my first post to the fedora developers list. Coincidence? I suspect not. Joe. On 4/13/05, William M. Quarles <walrus@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Hi all, > > I sent what I thought was a very important request to one of the Fedora > lists which was quickly beaten down, and I did not receive anything back > on subsequent replies. I would appreciate your help in making sure that > the lists are safe for all of us. I'm actually going to the trouble of > subscribing to nearly all of the Red Hat mailing lists just to get the > word out. > > One thing that I have done recently was to search for my e-mail > addresses on the Internet web pages to find all of the places that list > them. Why bother doing this? Just like how Google has spiders that > crawl the Internet to gather general information, spammers have spiders > that crawl the Internet to gather e-mail addresses to spam people. I > have contacted all of the websites who did not modify my e-mail > addresses (mostly on mailing lists) in such that they cannot be > collected. Red Hat has done at least one thing right in that they have > modified everyone's e-mail address in their web archive, such that it > reads something like <walrus bellsouth.net> for mine. > > However Red Hat has left one big gaping whole that the spam spiders can > still crawl into. There is a complete active mirror of these lists as > postable newsgroups kept on a service called Gmane <http://gmane.org>. > I'm using Gmane to write this message to you now. It's a pretty > sophisticated setup, has safeguards to prevent spam getting posted, and > they use Spam Assassin to clean up stuff that still ends up on the list > (except you have to filter it yourself on the newsgroup interface). The > only problem is that spam spiders crawl the newsgroups to collect e-mail > addresses. > > Gmane has a safeguard to prevent this, but it has to be turned on by the > list administrator. Gmane can encrypt the e-mail addresses on the list > such that any mail sent to them is routed through Gmane first, and then > the sender must under go a challenge-response before the message gets > routed to the actual recipient. Of all of the Red Hat lists I've only > found two newsgroup mirrors that use address encryption: > gmane.linux.redhat.fedora.java <fedora-java-list>, and > gmane.redhat.taroon <taroon-beta-list>. > > If you would like to see the Red Hat newsgroup mirrors have encrypted > e-mail addresses, please reply to this topic and discuss. If you are > even more brave (important since some of these lists are high-volume and > not everything gets read), please contact your list administrator > directly at <listname-admin@xxxxxxxxxx>. If someone knows how to get > the word out on the international lists or to their administrators > (since I don't speak multiple tongues), please do so. If someone knows > who to contact who can make all of the newsgroups have encrypted e-mail > addresses going above all of the list administrators (maybe the person > who decided to obfuscate them all on the web archive?) please contact > him or her and let us know how to contact that person. > > Thanks so much, > William > > -- > fedora-devel-list mailing list > fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx > http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list >
