[Sigia-l] a plea regarding the list archive & junkmail

[Andrew McNaughton]

On Thu, 31 Oct 2002, Andrew Hinton wrote:

> Problem is that I was using my work address (not this one) for a long time
> on this list, and there are 2 years or so of records sitting at
> info-arch.org that are available to anyone who wants to read them, and many
> of us were daft enough to actually not only post to the list from our
> somewhat permanent work or main-contact addresses, but we also had them
> plainly visible in our signatures at the end of each post.

I've done most of the technical work on setting up the info-arch.org list
archive, and am probably the person for whom it is easiest to make a
change to the way the archive works if that's what the list wants.  OTOH,
its not all that hard if someone else was to take care of it.

There was a little discussion of hiding addresses when the info-arch.org
archive was set up, and the feeling was against doing this.  Personally I
still think that publicising addresses is the right way to go.  This is a
public list intended to promote communication, and communication between
list members works best when addresses are public.

My address is all through the archive and I'm receiving a good deal less
spam than some people on this list have been reporting.  That suggests
that while some spam may well be resulting from harvesting from the list
archives, it's almost certainly not the source of the huge increase some
have been seeing.  I'm seeing 10-20 spams a day at present including virus
emails, of which about three or four bad emails per week get through my
filters.

If anyone wants info on my (unix based) filters I'm happy to provide that
information off list, but having a discussion of this on the list every
time spam comes up just increases the impact that spam has on all of our
mailboxes.  It gets very repetitive.

> So my work address (myfirstinitialandlastname at symetri.com), which is on all
> of my expensive biz cards and stationery and is used by hundreds of client
> contacts, is out there for any spam spider to pluck at will.

As others have commented, your address is already out there.  Even if we
change the archive now, its already been harvested, and also mirrors
exist which may be harder to track down and change.  eg
http://web.archive.org/web/20020127170712/http://www.info-arch.org/lists/sigia-l/

I suppose we could contemplate selective hiding of addresses, removing
specific addresses from the archives on request.  I'm not sure how much
this would acheive though given that the addresses are already out there.

Andrew McNaughton