Re: spam-proofing my mhonarc archive

[Mark Stosberg <mark@summersault.com>]

On Mon, 17 Feb 2003, Gunnar Hjalmarsson wrote:

> Mark Stosberg wrote:
> > I didn't want to just "XXXX" out the domain name, because
> > I wanted people to be able to contact the original authors of messages.
>
> Do the subscribers agree with you on that?

That's a good question, and I must admit I don't fully know the answer
in this case.

> If you run a mailing list, the subscribers can use the info on the email
> messages to contact *each other*. But are there typically strong enough
> reasons to provide email addresses in a publicly available list archive?
> In my opinion, considering the aggressive spammers: No!

It's not such a clear answer for me. I use a lot of technical mailing
lists. I try to be a "good citizen" and search archives of old messages
before I ask on the list. I would say that that most of the time I
actually find the answer in a previous discussion and don't need to
post. Sometimes I find someone who has had the exact same problem I'm
having, but never got a response at the time. In those cases, I find it
useful to contact the person directly and see if they've found a
solution since then. In those cases, it's nice to be able to figure out
their e-mail address. It's frustrating to have the experience when I
feel like I'm one step away from someone who can answer my question, and
I can't contact them.

It's also frustrating because it's hard to link recieiving spam to the
websites where the addressses were initially scraped. If we knew that
information, I think a lot more would happen to make e-mail harvesting
on websites hard.

I think I get about 50 spams a day now. Lately, I've had a great
experience with TMDA filtering nearly 100% of these (
http://www.tmda.net/ ). However, it's hardly at a point were I feel I
can  recommend it to Windows and Mac users, and it doesn't address the
issue at its core-- preventing the e-mails from being sent in the first
place.

	Mark

--
http://mark.stosberg.com/

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