[Mailman-Users] How to prevent email addresses from spambots?

[Scott Courtney]

On Monday 08 July 2002 12:10 pm, Bogardi Janos wrote:
> Hello Scott,
>
> Thanks for the answer. I'm afraid I was not specific enough.
>
> I'm aware of the option of setting the archives access to private. However,
> I'd like to keep it public - just to please honest users :)

I'm not sure how you would accomplish the contradictory goals. If the archives
are public, that means they are on a web page that anyone can access. If anyone
can access it, then so can spam harvesters. Ergo, a sufficiently smart spambot
can retrieve email addresses from any public web page.

The virtual URL /robots.txt, defined by the Robots Exclusion Protocol, is
supposed to be able to tell any spider not to scan certain pages. I doubt,
however, that spambots will respect this courtesy. Worse yet, legitimate search
engines *will* respect the file, so you'll probably get scanned by spambots but
not by real search engines -- the exact opposite of what you would like.

I'd love to hear that someone has a better alternative, but the only way I can
think of to keep public archives from being harvested by spambots is to
obfuscate the email addresses therein. For that, see below...

>
> The second option you mention obfuscates email addresses only in the "list
> members" page - which, in my setup, is only available for the list admin.

I'm running Mailman 2.1b2, and the e-mail addresses *are* obfuscated in the
archives. My address appears as "courtney at 4th.com" in the archives; I just
went to one of my lists and verified this. Perhaps this is an added feature
in 2.1b2; I haven't tested it with 2.0.x.

Scott

-- 
-----------------------+------------------------------------------------------
Scott Courtney         | "I don't mind Microsoft making money. I mind them
courtney at 4th.com       | having a bad operating system."    -- Linus Torvalds
http://4th.com/        | ("The Rebel Code," NY Times, 21 February 1999)
                       | PGP Public Key at http://4th.com/keys/courtney.pubkey