ADV:Harvest lots of Target Email address quickly

[Dustin Decker]

On Sun, 21 Apr 2002, Jonathan Hutchins wrote:

> A) Strip all HTML and Binary from messages.
> B) Allow only posting from addresses that have been verified by a reply to a
> message sent from the listmanager, ensuring a fully valid path and user ID.
> (B.1) Allow posts to/from other addresses listed under a primary address,
> similarly verified.)
> C) Strip individual email addresses from the on-line archives.  You may
> reply to an archived message by addressing the list, but not the individual.
>  (C.1, optional) Mangle archived addresses instead of stripping.  Substitute
> "at" for "@", insert spaces or decoys.  This only works until they build a
> better spambot.

/me nods...

Recently in an attempt to cast my net a little wider, I subscribed to a 
number of LUG's as far East as St. Louis and as far West as Wichita.  Of 
them all, I noted that the Air Capital Linux Users Group (www.aclug.org) 
is making use of Ecartis (http://www.ecartis.org/) [formerly known as 
Listar] and it seems to be pretty nice.  

There were significant validation processes required to actually
subscribe of course, and the handful of lists they have are archived for
all to see on the web... unfortunately with e-mail addresses intact 
which probably negates any of the other anti-spam features they use as 
they can be easily harvested.

If kclug at some time in the future does implement serious anti-spam 
features, my only request would be that any archives out there would 
somehow obfuscate e-mail addresses.  Perhaps something like they do on 
freshmeat.net - spelling the address out such as "dustind at moon-lite 
dot com" or the like.

Yeah, Yeah, I know any relatively intelligent person could perl these 
into real addresses, but at least we could cut down on the less 
intelligent autoharvesting a-holes out there.

I'm not sure that a complete solution exists - after all, SPAM is still 
alive and well after nearly a decade of existance.  I do agree, however, 
that we don't have to make this easy.  If someone wants to go through 
the trouble of harvesting my address, it's not likely I can stop that.  
But I would expect a list such as this to at a minimum put a baseline of 
anti-spam features in place to prevent list-wide SPAM from propagating.  
We've got a lot of serious talent subscribed... we should probably put 
it to use, eh?

Just my $.02
Dustin

-- 
"The assertion that 'all men are created equal' was of no practical use in
effecting our separation from Great Britain and it was placed in the
Declaration not for that, but for future use." -- Abraham Lincoln