Date: Tue, 09 Apr 2002 22:32:17 +0000 From: "Matthew Hanson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [LIB] SPAM ugh...
Pres alert! No Libretto content below. >Date: Tue, 09 Apr 2002 06:00:15 >From: "neil barnes" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > >>Date: Tue, 09 Apr 2002 03:59:42 +0000 >>From: "Matthew Hanson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >> >>I don't quite understand how MY email address gets from my Lib's W98 >>installation to the website I'm filling in a form for. I've only entered >>my email address into Eudora. But I'm wondering if Windows, >>or MSIE which is part of the OS, is able to grab my email address from >>Eudora. >> >>I know that a few years back, I used to post forms from my own website. >>The forms used the HTML mailto tags to send the forms to my ISP email >>address. The forms I submitted to myself came through with my email >>address listed clearly as the address the form was posted from. >> >>I also found that when people filled in a form on my website, they would >>frequently fill in the box for their email address. Sometimes that data >>matched the address the form was posted from, and sometimes it didn’t. >>The latter I would later find out was because they had been using a >>friend’s, library, business, or school computer to submit the form. >> >>There must be enough people on the list writing HTML and server scripts >>who know whether or not email addresses can be harvested like this. Could >>it be how I have W98 set up on my L70? >> >>Matt >More likely, a robot has done a web crawl and trawled you that way. A >google on taku_skan_skan returns 143 hits, from the libretto archives. A >search for @hotmail.com returns 2.6 million - and remember, these are only >the pages that someone else has linked to. Actually, I wasn't thinking about the SPAM I'm getting to my Hotmail email account. I was thinking about all the SPAM I get to my ISP email account. Way back in '95 or so, I began guarding my ISP email address from going out onto the net anywhere. That's why I use Yahoo and Hotmail. If I give any online websites, businesses, etc., an email address to contact me at, I give them those addresses. I never put my ISP email address into anything on the net where it might be found by a roving robotic worm. Yet I still get a decent amount of SPAM to that email account. And a while ago I began to suspect that every time I filled in a form on the web, that IPS email address was being used to transmit the form to the website's server script via that mailto tag somehow. I haven't entered my email address into MSIE, only Eudora. But if I went to my website right now, and filled in a form there and submitted it (I retested this a month ago), I will receive that form in the form of an email message at an online email account I set up for my website email. In the header for that email containing the form data from my website, my ISP email address is listed plain and clear. I don't know quite how that works, or if all forms submitted to websites by everyone do the same thing. Hecks... I could have harvested a ton of email addresses from forms submitted to my website! I can only guess that Windows and/or MSIE and maybe Netscape, manage to find email addresses configured into mail clients, and uses them in response to the mailto HTML tags on websites. I'm still wondering if anyone involved in HTML and writing server scripts might know what's going on with this. Matt _________________________________________________________________ Join the world’s largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. http://www.hotmail.com ************************************************************** http://libretto.basiclink.com - Libretto mailing list http://www.silverace.com/libretto/ - Archives -------TO UNSUBSCRIBE------- Reply to any of the list messages. The reply mail should be addressed to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Then replace any text on the message's subject line: cmd:unsubscribe --------TO UNSUBSCRIBE DIGEST------ Do above but with this on subject line: cmd:unsubscribe digest **************************************************************
