Traffic shaping broken with kernel errata

[Russell Coker]

On Thu, 12 Aug 2004 08:06, Mark Drago <markdrago at mail.com> wrote:
> Besides that, I would imagine that robots searching for email addresses
> to spam would be smart enough to recognize 'markdrago at mail.com' as an
> email address.

kmail will recognise such addresses when paster into the To: field when 
composing a message and automatically unmangle it.

On Thu, 12 Aug 2004 08:33, Leonard den Ottolander <leonard at den.ottolander.nl> 
wrote:
> I'm sure many robots will *not* recognize that as a valid email address
> though. Every robot that does not recognize that address will not add to
> the spam in your mailbox. And there is nothing stopping you to variate a
> bit to trick out the robots.

It doesn't do much good.  Once the address has been verified as working they 
will sell it to everyone else.

> All I am saying is not everybody appreciates his/her email address being
> included (unobfuscated) in whatever public email, even though (s)he
> subscribes to a public mailing list. I for one don't. Thus my request
> for your courtesy to obfuscate email addresses is you have to include
> them in public emails.

The best (and only effective) way of signalling a desire to not have an email 
address archived is to not use it on public mailing lists.  Once it's in the 
From: field in list email it's too late to do anything about it.

Having a mailing list mangle addresses in it's archives doesn't do much good 
either.  It's not difficult for any subscriber to make their own list 
archive.

Finally if you don't want your address to be spammed then you want to avoid 
saying controversial things on mailing lists.  It's not uncommon for someone 
to take revenge on someone who offended them on a mailing list by sending 
email to the "remove" addresses in spam with the other person's address in 
the From: field.  Email sent to the "remove" address on a spam gets harvested 
for the next spam run.  If this was done intelligently then the victim 
wouldn't even be aware of why they suddenly started getting a lot more spam 
(the one incident I have seen proven was where it was done stupidly).

-- 
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