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
On Thu, 24 Apr 2003, Dan Kegel wrote:
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)
I am sorry, but this makes the archives unavailable to Google, which is just plain unaccetable. We might as well not have them at all, our search engine on WineHQ is basically useless for searching the archives (it fails to do even a shitty job, whereas the same query on Google will get you what you want virtually every time).
Dimitrie O. Paun wrote:
On Thu, 24 Apr 2003, Dan Kegel wrote:
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)
I am sorry, but this makes the archives unavailable to Google, which is just plain unaccetable.
Right, which is why I went on to say:
- 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.
- Dan
Dan Kegel wrote:
... Right, which is why I went on to say:
- 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.
And I will just add that there have been a number of complaints to both the various lists and administrator email addresses recently, which make it clear that spammers are indeed currently harvesting email addresses off the wine archives. I agree that the archives really do need to obscure them.
On Thu, 2003-04-24 at 12:46, Duane Clark wrote:
And I will just add that there have been a number of complaints to both the various lists and administrator email addresses recently, which make it clear that spammers are indeed currently harvesting email addresses off the wine archives. I agree that the archives really do need to obscure them.
Ok, I can obscure them. I just need to write a script that goes through the archives to do that. I'm a bit busy today, but I will get to it. To save me time, someone could simply send me one.
I don't think our version of mailman has a feature to do that. A new one might. In that case it would be a good idea to upgrade our mailman.
First, I have seen a huge spam surge lately. I use unique email addresses for each mailing list, however, and very few of that spam had this email address (actually - none had this, and very little had my previous mail address).
I'm not saying that what you are asking for is not reasonable, just that it's not necessarily the source.
Dan Kegel wrote:
Right, which is why I went on to say:
- 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 say "go for it". HTML encoding should be sufficient as a first step. If necessary - we can use a javascript encoding (check my site out for a rather primitive example of that).
Shachar
Yes, I've noticed that in the past few weeks it's become particularly bad. I have no idea why there's suddenly such a huge volume, my spam traps don't seem to filter the new stuff out for some reason.
On Thu, 2003-04-24 at 17:24, Dan Kegel wrote:
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
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Dan Kegel -
Dimitrie O. Paun -
Duane Clark -
Jeremy Newman -
Mike Hearn -
Shachar Shemesh