On March 20, 2002 at 19:47, Jeff Breidenbach wrote: > Now the bad news is that I set up a honeypot address to catch spam as > soon as I added this obfustication, and that's already caught one > piece of spam, indicating a harvest. This is depressing, and I suspect > Mail-Archive will ultimately lose this arms race to the bad guys.
A general practice that people can follow to help minimize harvesting is to not include your regular email address in the body of messages that you compose. It is typically unnecessary since practically everyone will key off what is in the header (which is done automatically by the `repl' capability of users' MUAs). Also, for those that reply to messages and quote the message that is being replied to, DO NOT include email address headers. I notice that apps like Outlook automatically do this (an annoying behavior). --ewh P.S. There are legal movements to outlaw spam, so hopefully, the ultimate solution will be a legal one and not a technical one. Technical ones are hard, if not possible, to achieve since any smart harvester programmer can add heuristics to deal with common obfsucation techniques used by people and/or tailor harvesting programs to specific sites that are known to contain many obfsucated addresses. (Jeff, your `Reply' to button can be exploited). P.S.S. Sometimes your address may be given out by someone you do not know or by some mechanism outside of your control. For example, there was a dialup ISP that I used for a few years. I never gave out my mail address assigned to me since I had other addresses I used. However, soon after I signed up, I started getting ton of spam. The ISP said they do not give out any addresses, however I suspect that either someone has access to their subscriber list and selling it or someone is able to get at the information without the ISP knowing it. _______________________________________________ Gossip mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://jab.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gossip
