[Air-l] on posting people's email addresses

[Eszter Hargittai]

Hi,

I thought I'd throw out a suggestion that when people refer others to someone on this list, could they please not post the email address of the person in its full form?  Instead, you can easily tweak the address to say -at- or something else in the place of the @ symbol.

According to a study released by the Center for Democracy & Technology last spring, one of the main sources of spam is people's email addresses on Web sites.
http://www.cdt.org/speech/spam/030319spamreport.shtml

Since AoIR archives are publicly available on the Web, the addresses posted on them can be picked up by spam robots easily.  

The air-l list admins have kindly masked the email addresses of those sending messages to the list, however, when you post someone's email address in the body of the message it will be available for robots to harvest for spam lists.

So PLEASE do take care in posting others' addresses here and any other public space on the Web.

Thanks, Eszter

http://www.eszter.com
http://www.esztersblog.com

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