On Wed, Nov 03, 1999, Shlomi Fish wrote about "Eliminating Junk E-mail for List
members":
>
> Right now, the Linux-IL archives list the senders of the messages along
> with their E-mails. As it is, Spam harvesters can process the archives
> looking for E-mail addresses. So, list subscribers can expect to get more
> spam because of sending messages to the list.
>
> One way to eliminate this is to place a link to a CGI script that will
> return a mailto: URL instead of the standard
>...
I use a much simpler method on the Ivrix mailing-list archives: I simply
convert *everything* that looks like an email address to the string
"email@hidden". Granted, this way people will not be able to find any
emails in the archives, but I'm not sure this is a real problem. To talk
to mailing-list subscribers, people should probably join the list and mail
to it. It is still my contention that it is impolite for people to reply
directly to posters (instead of answering them in the list), and defeats
the reason for which the mailing-list was set up in the first place.
Other tricks, like the ones suggested by Shlomi, can easily be defeated
by spammers (although I doubt they actually do it now): after all, the
spammers already have a web-crawler to harvest email address. Why couldn't
this web-crawler follow the cgi link, see it is a redirect to a "mailto:"
link, and so add that email to it's crop?! Other tricks, like adding or
changing stuff in the middle of the addresses, are possible too, but unless
someone has a good reason not to hide all email address as I suggested
above, I'll stick to that fool-proof (and spam-proof) method.
Here's an example script to change all email addresses in a file to the
string "email@hidden":
sed 's/[a-zA-Z0-9_.-]*\@[a-zA-Z0-9_.-]*[a-zA-Z0-9_-]/email@hidden/g' < in >out
P.S. to anyone still bothered by spam, I suggest checking out procmail
and rblcheck. I admit it's very hard to set up with appropriate rules (my
procmail scripts are now over 600 lines), and to prevent false-positives,
but if scripting and spam-fighting are your passions, the results are very
rewarding. e.g, spam used to account for 50% of the emails I get (not
counting mailing lists), and now it is only about 1% :) And now I don't have
to worry if spammers get my address.
--
Nadav Har'El | ###### ######## # | <-- Sorry if
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] | # # # | you can't
Department of Mathematics, Technion | # # # | read Hebrew.
Israel Institute of Technology | ######## # ###### | Nadav. ;)
WWW page: http://harel.org.il/nadav ICQ #13349191
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