[Mailman-Developers] Interesting study -- spam on postedaddresses...

[John W Baxter]

At 20:36 -0500 2/20/2002, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
[Quoting Chuq]
>> See above. You don't get the analogy right.

[Jay]
>
>No, I merely don't value the email address's privacy as highly as you
>do.  I get about 50 spam a day in 200 new messages including about 14
>mailing lists -- I'm entitled to hold that opinion if I want.
>
>You *can't* make addresses overly private; they cease to be usable.
>
>At least, given the supporting tools and infrastructure we have today.

I have a domain, for no particularly good reason.  (I saw the word in a
book ad in Science News...I bought the book and the domain based on the ad.
And since "you could look it up" it's scandaroon.com.)

Once I had the domain, I started registering each product (or company's
products) with a unique local part @scandaroon.com.  Late last year, I had
a sudden infusion of Spam addressed to jwbpalm@scandaroon.com.  [Company
shall remain nameless ;-)]  Sending mail to that address now produces a 550
response whose text is "sold down the river by Palm"   (Which might be
wrong...they might have leaked it instead...which IMHO is worse.)  Palm is
probably following the privacy policy as it has evolved since I registered
the (early production) Palm IIIx.

For Usenet posting, I use an @spamcop.net address...the harvesters don't
seem to bother with those...no obfuscation seems to be needed.  (And yes, I
get to deal with "our" SpamCop reports, but for THIS purpose the service
works very well.)

Scrambling quickly back on topic:  some list admins could do well to try a
SpamCop address--or the like elsewhere--for list admin purposes for Mailman
lists.

  --John

-- 
John Baxter   jwblist@olympus.net      Port Ludlow, WA, USA