On Thursday, May 1, 2003, at 06:04 AM, Charlie Summers wrote:
> Is it likely that some spammer joined this list to harvest
> addresses? I
> doubt it. More likely, the scum simply harvested them from one of the
> web-based archives (Yahoo! comes to mind). But it's sure annoying...
>
They don't need to bother. List-managers makes it easy:
http://www.google.com/search?q=list-managers+charlie@lofcom.com&ie=UTF-
8&oe=UTF-8
you're in google, unprotected, thanks to the archives. All of us are.
I recently brought this up with mcb, since someone I had cc:ed to a
message I sent to the list asked about getting his address out of
greatcircle's archives. That didn't go very far, unfortunately.
This is why I put my archives behind a security realm years ago. This
is why I'm (too slowly) working on a new archiving scheme that'll cloak
email addresses and phone numbers in public archives. Once I get my own
archives up to snuff and make my tools available, I'll be starting to
leave lists that don't protect user's information in archives for the
same reason I won't be on lists that don't protect the posting address
from spammers.
Any mail list that makes its archives open and unprotected is handing
its subscribers to the spammers through the search engine. We're at the
time (past the time, actually) where that's no longer acceptable. I'm
working on tools that'll help solve that problem, but way too slowly
for my taste (life takes precedence right now), but I think every list
owner has to realize what they're doing to their subscribers by doing
this, and decide what their policy ought to be.
I'm a firm believer in public archives in the search engines as a
marketing/advertising tool for attracting new users, but I also believe
list subscribers need privacy from the spambots. I'm trying to find my
compromise, and I hope once I do others will find it useful as well.
But it's a problem I don't think we can ignore, and unfortunately, the
list that the list admins live on is one of the archives on the
"problem" list, not the "solution" list.
Might as well hand over the subscriber list to the spammers.
Effectively, that's what list-managers has done to anyone who's ever
posted to this list, or been referred to in one of its emails.
Follow-Ups:
References:
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