4:52 a.m.
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
remove or alter them such that they cannot be harvested by third parties?
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
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.
Thanks, ~C.
7:59 a.m.
On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 11:52:33 +0200,
Christoph Frieben <christoph.frieben(a)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.
2:18 a.m.
> 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 ...
I wonder what would happen if all this energy spent on
obfuscating and setting up spamassassin etc. would be spent on
tracking down the spammers and punishing them
for example, in Czech Republic, there were just 1458 reports
resulting in 81 penalty fees for breaking the "antispam" law
during 2008, which is a sad number considering the number of
Internet users here - if everyone would bother to report, I bet
there would be no Czech spam now
... also, as many countries do not have the appropriate laws,
things like fierce disconnecting ill Windows machines
participating in botnets would help a lot
K.
--
Karel Volný
QE BaseOs/Daemons Team
Red Hat Czech, Brno
tel. +420 532294274
(RH: +420 532294111 ext. 8262074)
xmpp kavol(a)jabber.cz
:: "Never attribute to malice what can
:: easily be explained by stupidity."
11 a.m.
On Thu, 2009-09-24 at 11:52 +0200, Christoph Frieben 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 remove or alter them such that they cannot be
harvested by third parties?
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 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.
You might want to read
http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-developers@python.org/msg11500.html
from the Mailman list. It's a proposal to remove the obfuscation code
from Mailman on the grounds that any publicly visible address will
eventually be harvested. I actually think obfuscation does help even if
it's not foolproof, but the proposal is worth reading.
poc
8:21 a.m.
On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 7:52 PM, Christoph Frieben <
christoph.frieben(a)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
remove or alter them such that they cannot be harvested by third parties?
A technical solution could be for the mailing list to eat the email and at
the bottom include a link to an image (or a captcha protected page) which
would contain the persons email address for off-list contact.
But it's worth adding, that I have a dedicated email account that has been
used for mailing lists over the last couple of years. In total it has been
hit by perhaps 2 or 3 spam messages (which makes me believe that they were
randomly guessed rouge spam rather than something harvested). So perhaps I'm
lucky, but it doesn't currently seem like a problem.
If you're concerned, create a different email account. It's hard to keep
your email address private on a public list =)
5326
days inactive
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4 comments
5 participants
participants (5)
-
Bruno Wolff III -
Christoph Frieben -
Eric Springer -
Karel Volný -
Patrick O'Callaghan