[CLUE-Talk] anyone else getting spammed? [Fwd: Re: clue.denver.co.us]

[Jim Ockers]

Hi everyone,

> > [spamming list members]
> 
> Me three.  The list of list members is not available to the public, but
> they can be harvested from the archives.  I'm not sure what facility
> mailman has for protecting the archives other than turning them off.
> One nice thing about having public archives is that we can search them
> through google.

Unfortunately this problem is not something that may not be directly
solveable by mailman, unless it obfuscates the sender's e-mail address.

What I believe has happened is that a spammer has subscribed to the
list.  Therefore they would receive a copy of every message posted to
the list.  From those messages they would have each sender's e-mail
address, which they use to send spam back to each poster.

You only get spammed if you post to the list.  If you lurk only, then
the spammer would not have your e-mail address.  I received that
spam (which came from Romania, in the ROEDU.NET IP address space, by
the way) within minutes or seconds of my post to the list.

Prior to that post, I had not received any such spam, because I'd only
been lurking for a while.

Presumably the spammer subscribed to the list fairly recently, and
therefore didn't have my e-mail address until I posted to the list.

As I say I'm not sure how to prevent this problem other than to have
the list obscure everyone's e-mail address, or something.  In any case
it would make the list a lot less useful because it would be a lot
more difficult to get anyone's e-mail address to respond or e-mail off
list, and how would you know if the person requesting your e-mail address
was a spammer or not?

I hate spammers.

-- 
Jim Ockers, P.Eng. (ockers at ockers.net)
Contact info: please see http://www.ockers.net/