[Mailman-Users] Complaint: My E-mail address appears on this site without my permission

[J C Lawrence]

On Sat, 26 Aug 2000 15:47:05 -0400 
John A Martin <jam at jamux.com> wrote:

> How do folks respond to complaints like the one below?

I respond very simply that the it is now rare for spammers to
harvest web sites for email addresses due to the fact that is
extremely trivial (and quite common) for sites to have traps
installed that:

  a) feed endless numbers of fake addresses to the harvester (eg a
  CGI with a random address generator)

  b) present infinite loops of cascading/different URLs (usually
  seeded with dyanmically generated fake addresses for the
  harvester) such that the harvester gets stuck in the trap and
  nevre harvests any real pages.

The result is that any attempted harvesy is likely to never compleat
(trapped in infinite URL CGIs), and what it does return is massively
salted with fake addresses (dynamically generated seemingly good
addresses).

-- 
J C Lawrence                                 Home: claw at kanga.nu
---------(*)                               Other: coder at kanga.nu
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/        Keys etc: finger claw at kanga.nu
--=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--