David,

Thanks for checking. To re-iterate what Danny said, I was not in intending
to blame GTA in any way. Just something about the format of one of the
files suggested a spider had gathered the names and that perhaps they were
targeting web mail list archives of which GNATBOX's list is one example.

The sample post which I picked at random to examine did not include any
actual email addresses, but there is the clever reply to button which when
pressed results in a redirect to a mailto: url with a cleartext email
address.

Since it appeared that the archive was being serviced by a perhaps common
archive tool with this email masking feature, it occured to me that the
jerks doing the scam had a tool which would crawl discrete archives and
harvest email addresses in fairly small chunks and the mailto: redirect
was easy to work around.

You didn't say, but I presume there were also email addresses in the
archive which weren't in the spam list.

As to my preference... probably remove the host name ... from any
addresses you find in the body AND provide a web form emailer for followup
questions which would use the webserver to actually send the followup. Or
perhaps restrict use of the mailer link to folks registered on the list
... one approach would be to email the original posting back to the user
with proper adornment for a subsequent reply. A small amount of filtering
to reclude many requests from the same target, etc.

Yeah .... I know that is a lot of work but as these (*&(*^%& spammers send
me junk I get more and more frustrating.

To sort of second Danny's comment, it would be really cool if the
GNATBOX could have builtin ability to maintain its own black list AND
white list.

Thanks again for all of your support.

   Dave Morris

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