Re: Fwd: [pgsql-www] Forums at postgresql.com.au

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