Re: MS mail bombs
At Fri, 26 Sep 2003 02:13:53 +0100,
Karsten M. Self wrote:
>
> [1 <text/plain; us-ascii (quoted-printable)>]
> on Tue, Sep 23, 2003 at 05:44:57AM +0800, csj (csj@zapo.net) wrote:
> > At Mon, 22 Sep 2003 06:26:05 +0100,
> > Karsten M. Self wrote:
> >
> > > If Swen is the shape of things to come, it's the end of dial-up
> > > POP3 mail accounts.
> >
> > There's a simple solution. Have the list munge the email
> > addresses before it appears in any publicly viewable form (e.g.
> > in the form of a web page).
>
> That's wrong any number of ways.
>
> My email address is useful. It's a benefit to me, and to third
> parties I'd like to contact / have contact me, to be able to
> close a communications loop in a matter of minutes or seconds.
> Which means reaching me based on published accounts with my
> mail attached to it.
An email address is not you. It's more like your suit or dress.
I've signed up for and discarded dozens of email addresses
because the mail box became too infested with spam to be useful
even with "pop deleters" like mailfilter (that is, the server
times out before the program can do its magic). Your comment is
only valid if your email address works like your social security
number.
> Hiding your email means the spammers have won.
But the spammers and worm writers have won.
> Secondly, viral mail *isn't* harvesting from archives (or not
> significantly). My understanding of Swen is that it's grabbing
> addresses from MSFT address books (standard), but also from
> mailbox and Usenet local cache. Meaning that th act of posting
> to mailing list with *NO* archive puts you at risk.
My own informal experiment indicate otherwise. I'm subscribed to
debian-user using "foo@fubar.net" and post (having subscribed to
the Debian white-list) as csj@zapo.net. Before subscribing to
d-u my zapo.net account was averaging zero spam and zero mail
bombs. The only spam my "@fubar.net" is receiving are the ones
that slip by Debian's filters.
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