Hi, executive summary: "please obscure the email addresses in the winehq mailing list archives, I'm drowning in spam"!
I am facing a tidal wave of spam. Recent research showed that the main way spammers get email addresses is by web crawling. Therefore, I'm doing a web search for my work email address (dank at ixiacom.com), and doing my best to erase all mention of it. I hate doing this, but the spam is getting so bad I have to do something, and spam filtering isn't quite doing the job. I expect others are now or will soon be in the same situation.
Most mentions of my work address are in web archives of mailing lists. While many mailing lists have instituted some privacy controls, many others have not.
Here's a couple examples of archived messages containing my work address: http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-users/2001/09/0474.html http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-devel/2003/02/0190.html I have no specific evidence the wine archives in particular have been harvested by spammers, but if Google can see my address there, so can they...
Examples of effective privacy measures for mailing list archives include: * restricting archive access to list members * not restricting access, but using the HTTP password mechanism to discourage spiders (e.g. perforce-users mailing list) * simply obscuring all email addresses in message headers or trailers That last countermeasure is my favorite one, since it means that Google will still have full access to the info in the list archive.
I would greatly appreciate it if the archive would institute one of the above spam countermeasures (preferably the last one). I understand that overly harsh spam countermeasures would be harmful to normal discourse, but I trust some useful middle ground can be found.
Thanks, Dan Kegel