[Air-l] Air-L list or archive raided for e-mail addresses by spammer?!

[Frank Schaap]

jeremy wrote:
> yes, it happens quite frequently that either we or google get scanned
> for e-mail addressed in the archives.  not much actually  nothing can be
> done other than not having archives.  the archives are set to remove
> addressed from the headers, but because some people respond to digests
> that contain e-mail addresses in them, the archives contain many
> addresses and there is not much that can be done about that other than
> deleting a large section of the archives.  even turning them to private,
> which I would not like to see happen, does not prevent a bot from
> getting to them by joining and unjoining, which good bots can do.

we've been over this before, but thinking about solutions for publicly
archiving a mailinglist, you might actually have to parse the archive files,
filter out e-mail addresses both in headers and in the body of the message,
then substitute with an ID that links back to a password protected file
containing corresponding e-mail addresses.

visitors can read the archives but only officially approved members of the
list can reply. joining and unjoining by bots would not yield them anything
because they'd have to first pay their membership before getting access. of
course a bot could join the list and suck up the ongoing e-mail messages, but
since the posters are a relative minority on any list, this is not so very
interesting I'd guess.

this would probably mean scripting the hell out of your archival system and
not something that I would want to do... but it might be a solution.


Frank.

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