list archive updates

Cliff cliffo at u.washington.edu
Mon Dec 30 13:18:31 PST 2002


Here's a vote against hiding email addresses.  I have received several 
emails from people not on the list asking for information about a 
posting or two.  I have not had a big problem with spam despite my email 
being in the archives for years now.

Cliff

Peter Abrahamsen wrote:

>Here's a vote for obfuscation. Also, if we write UW addresses as "bob at u",
>"jane at ee", etc, that's going to be pretty hard for spam harvesters to grok,
>but pretty easy for us. Doesn't do much for non-UW folk, but it's good for a
>lot of us.
>
>Peter
>
>On Mon, Dec 30, 2002 at 12:34:27PM -0800, M. Hornung wrote:
>  
>
>>There are lots of people on the list that don't have UWNetIDs, and it
>>seems like a Nice Thing to let strangers see the threads.
>>
>>So far it's a tie (not counting Cere cuz I can't tell which way your email
>>might be leaning).  Two for address obfuscation, and two against.  If we
>>count my vote then it's three against.  Personally my bias is toward no
>>address changing whatsoever.  I don't feel it's appropriate to use a
>>middle-of-the-ground approach like Steve suggested.  While it initially
>>seems like a good workaround, I have a sneaking suspicion that spammers
>>have ways of circumventing such tricks.  It seems the goal is to make
>>addresses human-readable but not able to be parsed by a spammer's toolset.  
>>The problem is that as soon as a human readable obfuscation system is used
>>it is then "known" to the bad guys and can be parsed.  Remember that
>>address harvesters probably don't really care if they initially get false 
>>positives.
>>
>>People will get your address sooner or later, so pretending that you can
>>hide it from spammers probably isn't the most honest outlook.  Better to
>>prepare for the spam (Spamassassin is working pretty well for me too, with
>>some drawbacks) and not obscure your published address.
>>
>>=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
>>  -=<(| mike at boobaz.net |)>=-          http://www.boobaz.net/key.html
>>           81CE 668E BC9D EDFE 08ED  D8D7 84A7 4F32 54C2 68F8
>>
>>
>>On Mon, 30 Dec 2002 at 12:11, Cere M. Davis wrote:
>>
>>|why don't you put in behind the UWIDNet system?  Or am I missing something
>>|here...
>>|>
>>|> On Mon, Dec 30, 2002 at 11:32:07AM -0800, M. Hornung wrote:
>>|> > Hiya.  I'm planning to do some New Year updating to my linux at u archive
>>|> > (more useful format, software update, general cleanup, etc).  It's been
>>|> > brought to my attention that some people might like it if email addresses
>>|> > of subscribers were obscured in the archive.  How do people feel about
>>|> > that?  I'll go with the consensus.
>>|>
>>|> I'm really opposed to it.  There have been a number of times when I've
>>|> found some information on a mailing list archive through google, wanted
>>|> to follow up on it, and was unable to because there was no way to mail
>>|> them.
>>|>
>>|> Hiding your address is just a temporary measure against spam.  If you
>>|> keep and use the same address for long enough you'll eventually get
>>|> spam, and it's better to deal with that as a certainty than try to avoid
>>|> it.
>>|>
>>|> (All IMHO, of course. :P)
>>|>
>>|>
>>|
>>|- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
>>|		        Cere Davis
>>|		Unix Systems Administrator - CSDE
>>|            cere at u.washington.edu   ph: 206.685.5346
>>|         https://staff.washington.edu/cere
>>|
>>|GnuPG Key   http://staff.washington.edu/cere/gpgkey.txt
>>|Key fingerprint = B63C 2361 3B9B 8599 ECC9  D061 3E48 A832 F455 9E7FA
>>|
>>|
>>|
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>    
>>
>
>  
>
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