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Re: Poster to this lists email address not obfuscated? If so it makes this list a heaven for spam bots...:-(



Hex Star wrote:

Hi, I've noticed that in the archive of this list, the posts I made publicly contain my full email address instead of it being obfuscated like on other lists (e.g. they change email addresses in the archive to something like user[at]domain[dot]com or user domain com, etc) it's fully displayed in its original format making it perfect for being picked up by spam bots...shouldn't the emai addresses in the debian archives for all the lists be obfuscated so that spam bots can't pick up the email addresses? I for one already have enough spam...:-/ :-(


There are two choices here. Either obfuscate or do not obfuscate. Both choices have their advantages and disadvantages. Either of them is a right choice, at the same time either of them is wrong. Usually the list manager chooses one and sticks with it.

Obfuscation:
1) Could be bad if some other person wants to contact the OP. If the email addresses are obfuscated, it would be hard/impossible to reach the OP. 2) Even if you make the addresses show up as email_id at domain dot com, there is no guarantee that spammers will not harvest it. They can have their bots tuned in such a way so as to recognize that, xxx at xxx dot com is an email address. Same thing applies no matter what the obfuscation procedure is.

No Obfuscation:
1) Spammers can harvest it. But at the same time, if someone wants to contact the OP, it is very much possible.

I think the list masters went with 'No Obfuscation' and are just sticking with it (since that is the way it has been for many years and the alternative is not foolproof).

To avoid spam I use the following steps:

1) use a separate gmail address for all the mailing lists. A separate gmail address would be better since gmail spam filter is not fool proof and you do not want to loose important email into spam folder.

2) Let gmail filter it for you. Their spam filters are trained from all the gmail addresses and not just from your email ID.

3) But since gmail's conversation view is not very convenient to read a high volume mailing list such as d-u, pop the emails into your favorite client such as thunderbird

4) Use adaptive junk mail controls in thunderbird to filter the spam again

Result :- I get around 1 or 2 (maximum 2) junk emails per day out of around 300 emails (99.33% effective!) that I receive from various mailing lists.

hth
raju

--
http://kamaraju.googlepages.com/cornell-bazaar
http://groups.google.com/group/cornell-bazaar/about



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