[Mediawiki-l] spam bots

[Brian]

Perhaps if people are obfuscating or not directly giving you their e-mail 
address it is because they don't want you to know what it is. 
Understandably, if someone doesn't want to talk to you and you want to talk 
to them, that can be frustrating. But that's their right.

When I sign up for a commercial website, I use the + gmail operator so that 
I know if they sell my address. For instance, if I sign up at
foobar.com<http://foobar.com>,
I would use reflection+foobar at . Then when I start getting spam I know where 
it came from. Since this is a mailing list, it's a pain in my rear to change 
my displayed address everytime I want to say something to 
reflection+wikitech-l@, so I had to use the base address of just reflection. 
When you do a google search for my e-mail address, the only results are from 
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.

If you go to mail.wikipedia.org <http://mail.wikipedia.org> and sign in to 
wikitech-l, you can access a list of Wikitech-l subscribers. A poor attempt 
is made here to obfuscate the addresses, using the 'at'. Most mail clients I 
have used automatically recognize this format and as a convenience turn the 
at into an @ for you. It is ridiculously easy for a harvester to do this. 
Even easier for them is to pluck the thousands of e-mail addresses sitting 
plainly in our archives.

I don't want to convince anyone that plainly posting your e-mail address on 
the web is a bad idea. I also don't want to convince anyone that receiving 
spam is an unpleasant experience. Further, I don't want to explain to anyone 
that it is a gross and unnecessary inconvenience to manage two or more 
e-mail addresses simply for the purpose of reading a mailing list. The merit 
must go over my head in the first place. Aren't I then just going to have to 
filter the spam out of the other address? Yes, yes I am. 

On 7/17/05, Morbus Iff <morbus at disobey.com> wrote:
> 
> >> Please tell me your physical address and telephone number - I would 
> like
> >
> > You, and everyone else, can get it by doing a whois on my domain, or by
> > simply accessing http://disobey.com/about/. Your comparison is flawed.
> 
> My apologies - I really had to pee. Let me explain.
> 
> I understand that people get spam. I understand that people get junk
> mail, that they get marketing calls, and that they get annoyed with it.
> I'm not contesting that people need, and want, to make changes to how
> they receive and filter information.
> 
> What I am against, however, is when those needs and wants *affect me*.
> And when people obfuscate mailing list archives, or they don't put their
> email address on their website *at all* (a recent pet peeve that is
> driving me absolutely bonkers), it is making my life more difficult, and
> the internet far less useful.
> 
> I'm all for people doing what they need to do to curtail the flow of
> garbage. But only if it doesn't fuck with me. Don't fuck with "my"
> mailing list archives. Don't force me to reply *twice* to an email you
> sent me so that I can be put in some whitelist in your badly designed
> spam filter. Don't force me to Sherlock Holmes for an hour to find your
> damn email address so I can tell you that you mispelt something on your
> page and it makes you look like a fool.
> 
> For me, asking someone to change the software that services 100+ people
> (a guess) just so I can live my life a bit easier, is *rude*. And,
> honestly, that's only going to help, what, a month? Eventually, you're
> gonna send an email to someone, they're gonna get some virus that
> leeches their .wab and archived From/To's stored in a mailbox, and
> you're just gonna be put on a list that way. Once you're on one list,
> you're gonna be on all of them, and forever (I still get junk to
> morbus at totalnetnh.net, which hasn't been used for nine years).
> 
> There are too many ways for email addresses to be discovered that you'd
> have to be sending out an awful lot of requests to change things, all
> for widdle-ol' you. ("Hi! Please don't use Outlook Express. It's bad. K.
> Thanks!", "Hi! Oop, looks like you have Windows! Hey, tell ya what.
> Please don't use that? K. Thanks!", "Dear Google: Hi! Someone posted my
> email address on this site. Please remove it from your archive, the
> Wayback Machine, and all the caches the world over. K. Thanks!").
> 
> --
> Morbus Iff ( rotinom ruoy edisni deppart mi pleH )
> Technical: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/779
> Culture: http://www.disobey.com/ and http://www.gamegrene.com/
> icq: 2927491 / aim: akaMorbus / yahoo: morbus_iff / jabber.org<http://jabber.org>: 
> morbus
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