[Fsfe-ie] Re: Spammers pulling addresses from these groups

Ciaran O'Riordan ciaran at member.fsf.org
Sat Jan 10 11:33:34 CET 2004


 James> Maybe the spammers will now recognise and harvest "a at b.org" ?

Myself and Niall talked about this off list (slightly off topic).

When I quoted niall before, I included his email address.  pipermail
converts '@' to ' at ' in the online archives, but there is also a
gzipped text file of the archives where the conversion doesn't take
place.  So there's three possibilities for why Niall it getting spam:

1/ The spambots have cracked the ' at ' conversion.
(Alan Cox says they all have)
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2003-December/msg00018.html

2/ The spambots are downloading gzip files, unzipping them, and scanning
them.  Gzip mailing list files available from here:
http://mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/fsfe-ie/

3/ The spambots are subscribing to mailing lists and then looking at the
subscibers list page.  (fsfe-ie has the subscribers list set to private,
but discussion at fsfeurope.org has it public.)

Nothing we can do about 1 or 3, but for 2, we should make sure not to
include unarmoured email addresses in our mails.  (I'll stop.  I don't
know if anyone else has been doing this.)

end of thread?

-- 
Ciaran O'Riordan - http://www.compsoc.com/~coriordan/


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