Re: List online archives and spam

While not inserting myself into the question of should/will there be some
changes to the web archives I have to ask what evidence there is that the
direct cause of the spam is due specifically to PostgreSQL's online archives.

Web crawling is one method but spammers can (and do) harvest addresses
directly from mailing lists (1. sign pact with devil, 2. sign up for all the
lists you can find, 3. collect unique email addresses from the arriving
emails - trivial). Same goes for messages posted to usenet.

Then there are Rumplestiltskin (sp?) attacks and plain first names (greg) are
the easiest to collect using this method (connect to email servers and try
batches of common names - add those that don't generate "invalid address"
errors to your list - no publicly visible source of emails needed).

So "fixing" the on-line archives might slightly delay the email addresses'
entry to the spammers list it won't prevent it any more than locking one of
the five doors on a house will keep the burglar out.

Cheers,
Steve

On Thursday 06 February 2003 10:34 am, greg(at)turnstep(dot)com wrote:
> > due to the online availability of this mailing list's archives I am now
> > flooded with spam.
> >
> > Are there any plans to implement a protection of the email addresses
> > in the online archives?
>
> This question was asked a few days ago but never answered. Could
> someone from the web development group at least give a yes or no
> answer? Since the archive is already parsing the emails into mailto
> links, this seems like it would be a trivial fix.
> Thanks.