Re: [T3] spam, address scrapped from the archives..

[John Fessenden "fess" <fess-vwtype3.org@fess.org>]

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On Dec 7, 2004, at 6:30 PM, Jim Adney wrote:

> On 7 Dec 2004 at 9:23, fess wrote:
>
> > I've just started getting spam addressed to the email address I use to
> > post to the list.
>
> Your suggestion to elide the email addresses is probably a good one, 
> but it
> probably won't have a significant effect. I'm pretty active on 
> newsgroups,
> where everyone says to obscure your email address. If that were really 
> true,
> I'd be swamped, but I still find that it goes in spurts which don't 
> seem to
> correlate to anything that I do on my end.

an email address is picked up a variety of ways by spammers, the 
harvest it from web pages / newsgroup postings [ extremely common ], 
They convince you to give it to them through some web offering [ less 
common. ], they spread viruses  that harvest email addresses from 
contact lists on end users machines.  [rare, sending information back 
anywhere helps the virus author get caught, viruses also account for a 
lot of junk mail, it's how a certain type spreads, this is also one of 
the sources of "don't use microsoft" they are the main stream and are 
exploited often. ]

Then, the spammers sell your address to other spammers. This happens 
continually. So, once your address is captured, the amount of aggregate 
spam sent to it slowly increases over time, as the years go by an 
address gets more and more polluted, all from being captured once 
somewhere.

All current spam filtering techniques are an arms race, no technique to 
date does not have a method of defeating it, that the spammers have 
already learned.

Hopefully I've illustrated that it's worth while to avoid having your 
email picked up in the first place.

I use a unique email address for this list, and unique ones for 
everything else, as I'm tracking leaks. Now it is getting spammed.

1. eliding the email addresses from the mail archive prevent this leak,
however they make it difficult for people to know who to contact, about 
something in the archives, other than contacting the list directly. so 
there is a tradeoff.
2. obscuring the email address is a compromise choice, in which the 
obfuscation patterns will eventually be recognized by
harvesters.
3. do nothing. it's true it's easiest, and doesn't matter too much now, 
as everyone's existing address has been picked up
and put into the channels of spam address trading.


Having been on the net a long time, and now doing most of my lifes 
communication via email, spam is a huge productivity loss in my day.  
As probably is my obsession with defeating it.

Thanks for listening.
My humble apologies for spending so much time on the subject.

--fess











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