On Sunday 30 April 2006 01:53, Walt Ogburn wrote: > On Sat, 29 Apr 2006, C. J. Clegg wrote: > > I know that I, for one, would have been Very Pissed Off if my real > > email address got exposed here without my consent, and I suspect that > > I'm in the majority, here, so it's probably a Really Bad Idea to > > crosspost mailing lists to newsgroups without the knowledge and > > consent of the people who think they're posting only to the mailing > > list. I am one of those that are "Very Pissed Off". > > The mailing list has always been archived online, so anyone can pull your > e-mail address off of the archive even without the newsgroup. No, this is NOT true. If you look closely at the postings, you see any "@" characters substituted with "at" and perhaps the "." by "dot". That makes an automatic harvester's job much much harder since there are no special characters to find that signify an email address. Unless the harvester knows the exact format of each archive posting and where exactly the email address was, it would be pointless to try to harvest from the archives that I have seen because the spammer's list would be peppered with bogus addresses. When I post on Usenet using a news client, I have control over how my email address looks. Here, I don't. This gratuitous linking of the mailing list to a Usenet group without even any attempt at obfuscating email addresses is the height of irresponsibility and inconsideration by the owners of this list. Saying "yes, but you can use a spam filter"; sure, why should I have to spend an extra 10 minutes or more downloading a 20-fold increase in spam that all needs to get sent to a junk folder and then waded through to make sure no false positives hide good email, because of some list administrator's boneheaded and ill-thought-out decision. Really really sad. Really really bad idea. I'm going to have to dump this email address. Thanks, guys. > This > shouldn't be a surprise to anyone, since the archives are linked from the > same web page where you find about the mailing list. Linking to the > newsgroup makes no difference as far as exposing e-mail addresses goes, > because the mailing list is as publically visible as the newsgroup is. The mailing list is NOT as publically visible because it obfuscates email addresses, making at least a minimal attempt to protect against the automated spam harvesters. Newgroups post the email addresses in the clear with the @ character. > > http://www.winehq.org/site/forums > http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-users/2006-April/thread.html > > _______________________________________________ > wine-users mailing list > wine-users@xxxxxxxxxx > http://www.winehq.org/mailman/listinfo/wine-users _______________________________________________ wine-users mailing list wine-users@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.winehq.org/mailman/listinfo/wine-users
