Re: [ATM] SPAM AGAIN!

[Mark Holm <mdholm@telerama.com>]

Chris Rowland wrote:

> It seems to be fundamental to the way the list - and the archives - 
> work. Our email address are posted in the archives, in clear, for anyone 
> to harvest.
> It doesn't seem to be anything that individual people can do anything 
> about, or an issue of posting in HTML.  It is when the messages are 
> converted to HTML  - including the headers - for the archives that the 
> problem arises.

Looking at the recent archives, from January 2004 onward,as found at
http://www.atmlist.net/pipermail/atm/ , I do not see headers posted.
The message sender's email address is present, though it is (weakly)
obfuscated, e.g. mdholm at telerama.com  Very probably, some spam
address harvester's can defeat this simple form of obfuscation.  The
obfuscated email addresses do not seem to link to plain or html forms of
the addresses.

The older archive, at http://astro.umsystem.edu/atm/search.html , does
include unobscured email addresses.

Something to keep in mind is that email addresses published on the web
are hardly the only sources of email addresses for spam any more.  Virus
writers, getting paid by spammers, now include spamming services in the
viruses they plant on unsuspecting computers.  One of the services they
provide to spammers is harvesting the email addresses they find on
infected computers.  They program the viruses to go through email
address books and emails stored on the infected computer, then send the
harvested addresses back to the "controller" who sells them to spammers.
 If this were accomplished on my computer, for example, the harvester
would easily find the addresses of nearly all active atmlist members.

My wife has two email accounts, one at home, and one at the public
school where she teaches.  She rarely uses the home account, never has
belonged to any mailing lists, never uses the school account for
anything other than school business, yet she gets spam on both accounts.
   A Google search of her school address returns zero hits, but the
account still gets spam.


-- 
Mark Holm
mdholm@telerama.com

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