Preventing spammers from infiltrating the Red Hat mailing lists

[William M. Quarles]

Paul Howarth wrote:

> On Wed, 2005-04-13 at 12:36 -0400, William M. Quarles wrote:
> 
>>I sent what I thought was a very important request to one of the Fedora
>>lists which was quickly beaten down, and I did not receive anything back
>>on subsequent replies.  I would appreciate your help in making sure that
>>the lists are safe for all of us.  I'm actually going to the trouble of
>>subscribing to nearly all of the Red Hat mailing lists just to get the
>>word out.
>>
>>One thing that I have done recently was to search for my e-mail
>>addresses on the Internet web pages to find all of the places that list
>>them.  Why bother doing this?  Just like how Google has spiders that
>>crawl the Internet to gather general information, spammers have spiders
>>that crawl the Internet to gather e-mail addresses to spam people.  I
>>have contacted all of the websites who did not modify my e-mail
>>addresses (mostly on mailing lists) in such that they cannot be
>>collected.  Red Hat has done at least one thing right in that they have
>>modified everyone's e-mail address in their web archive, such that it
>>reads something like <walrus bellsouth.net> for mine.
> 
> 
> Unfortunately google picked up 47 unmunged instances of your address so
> for that particular address it's a lost cause. The cat is already out of
> the bag and you won't be able to put it back in.

I'm working on it.

> If you're going to post
> to public mailing lists or otherwise "leak" your address on the
> Internet, you need to either have decent spam filtering on your mailbox,
> or use a disposable mail address such as a gmail account that you can
> afford to discard if the spam load gets too big.
 >
> There's little point in pestering Red Hat to change the way that an
> external organisation like gmane publishes data; that would be better
> addressed to gmane but I still think it's a wasted effort.

Gmane will only do it at the list administrator's request.  That's why 
I'm trying to rally some support.

> fedora-list
> is mirrored in many different places (e.g. fedoraforum.org,
> homelinux.net and no doubt other places too). There is also nothing to
> stop spammers joining the list and harvesting addresses posted to them
> by the list contributors.
> 
> Spam is an unwelcome scourge on the Internet but munging addresses will
> only slow down the rate at which you get spammed, it won't stop it.
> 
> Paul.