On Mon, 2019-01-14 at 23:25 +0000, Pete Biggs wrote: > Well, sort of a source of spam. > > At times I've mentioned that I seem to see an increase in spam when I > post to the evo list - mostly it's subjective and others have not seen > it and I'm certainly willing to accept it is coincidental. > > However, recently I've seen lots of failed delivery attempts on my mail > server. Nothing new about that, it's a regular occurrence. But these > failed addresses are message IDs that have, obviously, been harvested > from somewhere. Specifically, I'm getting log messages of the type: > > 2019-01-14 20:57:31 H=(mail.rentautos.eu) [85.14.240.55] > F=<usly...@rentautos.eu> rejected RCPT > <1421662613.17426.6.ca...@biggs.org.uk>: Unknown user > > (I don't think there's anything there that needs to be redacted! The > hosts and From addresses change frequently.) > > Every single one of those message-ID type addresses are from mails I > have sent to the Evolution mailing list. They are from a while ago - > 2015 to be precise - but still, someone is obviously harvesting > anything that even vaguely looks like an email address from an evo > mailing list archive somewhere. > > I know there's absolutely nothing anyone can do about it, and these > things are just noise in my logs, it's just interesting that it is > evidence that someone/something has been harvesting the list and no > doubt our real addresses have got themselves on a list somewhere.
I've seen a few of those, though only very occasionally. Possibly my spam filter (Gmail) is trapping them, though I'd need to look to be sure. The archives are of course on-line, and even though they don't directly the poster's address is (trivially) obscured it would not be difficult to write a script to harvest this info. And of course anyone who keeps a private archive could also be a source. Even storing old list traffic (as I do myself) would be be vulnerable to intrusions. poc _______________________________________________ evolution-list mailing list evolution-list@gnome.org To change your list options or unsubscribe, visit ... https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/evolution-list
