Fair enough, certainly. But, in my head, if they have a website, they're doing so for someone to read it. If they *only* wanted people to read it, they'd write a book, where interaction is difficult. Interaction is implied when you publish something (non-anon) on the *inter*net.
Know you tried to nit-pick my argument, so I will have to point out the difference in monetary cost between publishing on the internet and publishing a book. Presumably you have not tried to publish a real physical book? OK, the punchline is that it's much, much, much more flexible, cheap and easy to deliver by publishing on the internet
THAT is the reason people often publish on the internet, NOT because they desire interaction. (Of course it depends on your definition of interaction as well).
Your point also suggests that one should have an individual choice, upon signup, on whether his address were obfuscated in an archive (or, more sensibly, on live sends too, such that private archives wouldn't have it either). I guess I'd "support" an opt in feature for that, although I'm conflicted in so-doing (*choice* is something I never want removed, and it'd be an individuals' choice, not a forced capability applied to every one); I'd certainly opt out of it.
Oh, why do people object to the owners of a list spending a few mins making it "hard" for a spammer to syphon off all the email addresses, whilst still allowing a human to interact? There are a number of ways this can be reasonably done.
this mailing list. (a couple others are similar, but not mine). That means that the 2-3 spam messages I get per day on this relatively new address are
from this mailing list.
I'm not sure I fully agree, though it is certainly a possibility. You're telling me that you implicitly trust every person you've sent a personal email to to be expert enough to secure their machine from harvesters? Or that every one of our subscribers on this list have pure machines that couldn't have third partied your email to someone, through no fault of the public archive?
Well, actually, since I do run a commercial email service I think I can help answer this question. I don't have millions of customers like Hotmail, but I do have a large enough selection that I can promise you that my customers "do not get spam". Every so often one of them starts to receive stuff and will write to complain - I can usually put their email address into google and discover the source of the leak and that the publishing of the address was within days or a week of them first getting a spam message.
So I haven't seen a lot published about this, but my conclusion is that at least some spammers appear to be harvesting addresses from google rather than harvesting web pages (side bar: curious if anyone can confirm or deny this).
The practical upshot is that you can happily receive zero email in this world for years and years. Generally you will start to receive large amounts of spam within days of publishing your email address somewhere that google can see it.
Posting to mailing lists (and to a lesser extent these days to usenet) seems to be the fastest way to ramp up the amount of spam you will receive. I therefore claim that it's worth trying to obfuscate your email address if possible. Why hand out bricks to people smashing your windows?
This is a controversial topic clearly. My take on this is that personally I am IT literate and have absolutely no problem rigging up a spam scanner which means that I very rarely ever see a spam message - I get hundreds in my spam bucket that I never read, but rarely anything in my INBOX. However, I sell email services to "real people" and very few of them can properly operate the anti-spam functions (it says "on" or "off"...), let alone rig all the code up and build their own spam filters if I hadn't provided all these functions for them. My 2p is spent trying to defend all those people who aren't computer nerds like me....
Ed W