spam mail fodder from public mailing lists

spam mail fodder from public mailing lists

[Gray Watson]

Hey:

So yesterday I spidered your public mailing lists on:

   http://gcc.gnu.org/lists.html

I was able to get 38000 email addresses (probably ~10000 of which are
valid).  This is a gold mine for spam email spiders.

I think it irresponsible in this day in age to provide fodder for the
spammers and I encourage you to remove them ASAP.  I'm not talking
about changing "foo@bar.com" into "foo at bar dot com" which is
trivial to decode.

If you need help or technical assistance with this, please let me
know.

thanks,
---
gray.resp@256.com

Copyright 2003 by Gray Watson.  Publicatation of this email message on
the Internet without permission from the author is expressly prohibited.

Re: spam mail fodder from public mailing lists

[Aaron Lehmann]

On Thu, Apr 24, 2003 at 01:35:35PM -0400, Gray Watson wrote:
> Hey:
> 
> So yesterday I spidered your public mailing lists on:
> 
>    http://gcc.gnu.org/lists.html
> 
> I was able to get 38000 email addresses (probably ~10000 of which are
> valid).  This is a gold mine for spam email spiders.

Obfuscating email adresses is giving in to spammers. It's silly and a
few minutes of perl education is enough to decipher "foo at bar dot
com" or whatever non-computer-readable format people use. I'd rather
that people held spammers accountable for their actions rather than
hide from them. Of course, it isn't easy.

Re: spam mail fodder from public mailing lists

[Joseph S. Myers]

On Thu, 24 Apr 2003, Gray Watson wrote:

> I think it irresponsible in this day in age to provide fodder for the
> spammers and I encourage you to remove them ASAP.  I'm not talking
> about changing "foo@bar.com" into "foo at bar dot com" which is
> trivial to decode.

Whereas I think the existing munging started going too far when it started 
munging message bodies as well as headers, and thereby started affecting 
the readability of patches in the list archives by messing up Texinfo in 
patches (e.g. <http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2003-04/msg01353.html>).
Although at least there is the "Raw text" option to get uncorrupted 
message bodies - there are some list archives that completely remove what 
they think are email addresses and provide no apparent mechanism to see 
what the corrupted patch actually said.  Since there is experimental 
evidence that spammers cannot even decode HTML entities in email 
addresses, could we turn off all visible munging of bodies and use HTML 
entities - invisible to readers using browsers - for any place where 
concealment from spammers is considered appropriate?

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
jsm28@cam.ac.uk

Re: spam mail fodder from public mailing lists

[Andrew Haley]

Aaron Lehmann writes:
 > On Fri, Apr 25, 2003 at 01:32:11PM -0700, Bruce Korb wrote:
 > > 
 > > I used to agree.  If you do a wget on this page:
 > > 
 > >   http://autogen.sourceforge.net/announce.html
 > > 
 > > At the very bottom, you'll see indecipherable javascript gobbeldygook.
 > > If you do a "view page source" on it, you'll see some HTML mailto
 > > markup that email harversters never look at and if they do they
 > > cannot decipher.  Finally, if you x-copy and x-paste, you'll get
 > > English text.  Something along those lines ought to please everyone.
 > 
 > Except lynx users, the blind, people who don't use X, and people who
 > turn off javascript.
 > 
 > One of the programmers I know is blind and I shudder to think how
 > Netscape/IE-only websites are completely inaccessible to him.

You're right to point this out.  One of the things we can do as Free
Software authors is lead the way in showing how opportunities to work
together are there for everyone, regrdless of disability.

Andrew.

Re: spam mail fodder from public mailing lists

[Michael S. Zick]

On Friday 25 April 2003 06:42 pm, Aaron Lehmann wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 25, 2003 at 01:32:11PM -0700, Bruce Korb wrote:
> > I used to agree.  If you do a wget on this page:
> >
> >   http://autogen.sourceforge.net/announce.html
> >
> > At the very bottom, you'll see indecipherable javascript gobbeldygook.
> > If you do a "view page source" on it, you'll see some HTML mailto
> > markup that email harversters never look at and if they do they
> > cannot decipher.  Finally, if you x-copy and x-paste, you'll get
> > English text.  Something along those lines ought to please everyone.
>
> Except lynx users
Lynx can display graphics

> the blind, people who don't use X, and people who
> turn off javascript.
>
> One of the programmers I know is blind and I shudder to think how
> Netscape/IE-only websites are completely inaccessible to him. One good
> example of a website that isn't friendly to the blind is ticketmaster,
> which requires you to transcribe a word from an image to prove that
> you aren't a computer.
There are utilites that take a character string as input and produce
a small graphic image file of what the characters would appear as.

Such a trick might well make a blind user's text-to-speech converter
studder, but...

Unless some web-spider has a built-in scanned image, character
recognition function, they should studder also.

Mike

Re: spam mail fodder from public mailing lists

[Joe Buck]

On Fri, Apr 25, 2003 at 04:42:04PM -0700, Aaron Lehmann wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 25, 2003 at 01:32:11PM -0700, Bruce Korb wrote:
> > 
> > I used to agree.  If you do a wget on this page:
> > 
> >   http://autogen.sourceforge.net/announce.html
> > 
> > At the very bottom, you'll see indecipherable javascript gobbeldygook.
> > If you do a "view page source" on it, you'll see some HTML mailto
> > markup that email harversters never look at and if they do they
> > cannot decipher.  Finally, if you x-copy and x-paste, you'll get
> > English text.  Something along those lines ought to please everyone.
> 
> Except lynx users, the blind, people who don't use X, and people who
> turn off javascript.

Which means we can't use such techniques.
 

Re: spam mail fodder from public mailing lists

[Aaron Lehmann]

On Fri, Apr 25, 2003 at 01:32:11PM -0700, Bruce Korb wrote:
> 
> I used to agree.  If you do a wget on this page:
> 
>   http://autogen.sourceforge.net/announce.html
> 
> At the very bottom, you'll see indecipherable javascript gobbeldygook.
> If you do a "view page source" on it, you'll see some HTML mailto
> markup that email harversters never look at and if they do they
> cannot decipher.  Finally, if you x-copy and x-paste, you'll get
> English text.  Something along those lines ought to please everyone.

Except lynx users, the blind, people who don't use X, and people who
turn off javascript.

One of the programmers I know is blind and I shudder to think how
Netscape/IE-only websites are completely inaccessible to him. One good
example of a website that isn't friendly to the blind is ticketmaster,
which requires you to transcribe a word from an image to prove that
you aren't a computer.

Re: spam mail fodder from public mailing lists

[Bruce Korb]

> > I think it irresponsible in this day in age to provide fodder for the
> > spammers and I encourage you to remove them ASAP.  I'm not talking
> > about changing "foo at bar dot com" into "foo at bar dot com" which is
> > trivial to decode.
> 
> Whereas I think the existing munging started going too far when it started 
> munging message bodies as well as headers, and thereby started affecting 

I used to agree.  If you do a wget on this page:

  http://autogen.sourceforge.net/announce.html

At the very bottom, you'll see indecipherable javascript gobbeldygook.
If you do a "view page source" on it, you'll see some HTML mailto
markup that email harversters never look at and if they do they
cannot decipher.  Finally, if you x-copy and x-paste, you'll get
English text.  Something along those lines ought to please everyone.
I believe that no email addresses are harvested from my pages any more.