On 22/11/10 07:40, Elliot Chance wrote: > It does surprise me a bit that when I (or someone else) signs up to a mailing list (not postgres specifically) that there is no fine print or agreement that says something along the lines of "Your email address will be plastered all over the internet, guaranteed to be picked up by spiders, make sure you have a good anti-spam." > > This doesn't so much bother me because the address I use on the mailing list is public and already on googles index but I bet some people don't like it, and once they realise its too late you can't remove emails from a mailing list. Forums are designed to act as the barrier that stops anyone from getting your address if you so choose. Spammers routinely subscribe to mailing lists and scrape addresses out of incoming mail, so filtering archives doesn't do much good these days. As far as I'm concerned it's way past the day when hiding your email address was useful. Some PhpBB or Wordpress forum you sign up to will get cracked and a spammer will scrape the email addresses from the database. Someone you know will have a crappy webmail account cracked, or their password recovery question(s) guessed, and a spammer will scrape your address from their address book before using their account to flood out spam. Someone else will have a trojan or worm hit their machine, doing much the same thing to the addressbook and recent-recipients address lists in their rich mail client. Another spammer will get your email address along with your credit card details when they crack the poorly secured database of somewebstore.com . Someone else gets it when you sign up to the account required to actually download the software you just bought from mudbricksoftware.com when you accept the "really, we promise not to pass your address on, honest" checkbox. And so on. The only real answer is decent anti-spam software. Per-list addresses can help a little, but personally I prefer to have it all come to one mailbox. -- System & Network Administrator POST Newspapers -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
