On 12:21 AM 2/28/01, Chuq Von Rospach wrote:
>What do I do? That would be telling. Other than saying my archives are
>behind a password, are protected by a robots.txt, and aren't in the global
>search engines or anywhere the spambots can get to without a lot of work,
robots.txt is widely ignored by spammer email harvester robots.
>but that I also have to find an EASIER way for users to get to them, because
>the current system sucks -- but I'm not doing away with it until I can make
>it easier without cutting security...
I've been told (but not personally verified) that if the actual archive
files are not linkable except through a search interface, they will not be
spidered. It's pretty hard to write a spider that can intelligently go
through a search interface, so most email harvester robots don't
try. There's enough of the web out there that they can't spider through
all of it anyway.
I do know that I get zero spam via the email addresses that are listed for
several different egroups/yahoo groups lists, even though I've been on
several of these lists for over 2 years. And none of the addresses used on
those groups is findable with a web search.
jc
