debian.org mailing list archives being harvested by spammers

[Dan Kegel <dank@kegel.com>]

Hi,
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 an example of an archived message containing my work address:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-openoffice/2003/debian-openoffice-200301/msg00170.html

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 debian.org 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

--
Dan Kegel
http://www.kegel.com
http://counter.li.org/cgi-bin/runscript/display-person.cgi?user=78045