Real mail addresses in list postings and resulting **SPAM**

Bruno Wolff III bruno at wolff.to
Thu Sep 24 12:59:51 UTC 2009


On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 11:52:33 +0200,
  Christoph Frieben <christoph.frieben at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Does anybody have a good idea how to avoid the appearance of real mail
> addresses in the body of postings to fedora-devel/test-list when people
> reply to an earlier message? Could additional technical measures be taken to

Yes. Don't include your real address in your from header.

> remove or alter them such that they cannot be harvested by third parties?

Doing that doesn't prevent harvesting. The lists are open and if you
subscribe you get to see all of the addresses as messages arrive.

> It seems that the problem is amplified by sites which mirror the original
> list without taking the same measure to obfuscate mail addresses, e.g. by
> filtering out the commercial at sign. Thus the problem is not one of how

Most of these places replace @ with 'at' and it is common enough, that matching
patterns with 'at' and 'dot' are almost as easy as just looking for '@'
and '.'.

> Fedora list archives are managed/displayed but rather one of preparing
> incoming messages before postingthem to the list subscribers.
> Any subscriber could help of course by removing/obfuscating real mail
> addresses in the message body before posting it to the list.

Except a lot of us believe that this is pointless and it should be on the
shoulders of people that don't want their addresses to show up to do the
work for something that matters to them, but not other people.
You can do it on your end once and for all and then no one else has to worry
about it.




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