On Sep 01, Peter T. Abplanalp [[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote: > On Sat, Aug 31, 2002 at 04:31:54PM -0700, Will Yardley wrote: > > Yes, but it's much less likely to happen... a spammer would have to go > > to a lot of effort (comparatively) to sign up for a list like this... > > and spamming a list of largely technical people would be dumb anyway. > > i disagree. it would be trivial to set this up. i could set up a > system in less than half an hour that would harvest the email > addresses of posters. anyone who thinks that spammers aren't smart > enough to do this is deluding themselves. even if the spammers > weren't smart enough, they could pay someone who was to do it.
You are correct in theory, but wrong in practice. The simple fact is that they aren't mining lists (yet), and avoiding posting your address online does prevent them from finding you as easily. Simple evidence: the web sites I admin that require my address to be posted on them get almost nothing but spam to those addresses, and have for years. The ones I admin that I only post a link to my website on (which in turn doesn't have an email link but pretty much says anyone with a brain can figure out how to mail me based on the site host name) do not get spam. Also, I posted for years to these mutt lists using a -mutt address, and never got a single spam to that address. Within minutes of posting my first feedback to the mutt bug tracking system, I was receiving spam to this address (the BTS posts full, unobfuscated messages on the web; the bugs themselves receive enough spam to make reading the bug logs a serious pain). It is of course accurate to say that spammers aren't mining lists directly because they don't need to yet, and if everyone hid their address from web pages, they would probably start doing this. Nevertheless, it does work to hide your address now, and works quite effectively, and it's silly to claim it doesn't. As I noted before, none of these things are complete solutions, but they all contribute to the solution. > i do feel for those poeple that have to manage large email systems. i > can see that they have it worse than i. all i have to do is filter my > own email. i do this using spam assassin and see hardly any spam in > my inbox. i do, however, agree with sven and the couple others that say > hiding is not the answer. you just can't hide effectively as we've > pointed out. I appreciate you "feeling for" us, but if you want to help, please do try to see the big picture, and work to know the enemy. We can't fight them if we fight them as we would be if we were them, we can only fight them if we fight them as they are. (BTW, if anyone thinks calling them "the enemy", etc. is overly melodramatic, remember that spam in recent years has moved more and more from printer toner to all manner of pr0n, beastiality, etc. spams, and many of us are stuck trying to keep our bosses and spouses and parents and kids from being assulted with that trash.)
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