Re: [abcusers] mail-archive.com, the spammer's friend

[Dave Holland]

I wasn't going to contribute again to this off-topic discussion, but I
have some news which might be welcome.

The mail-archive.com administrator has recently said:

| Finally, the more stringent address obfuscation suggest
| (i.e. clobbering the domain completely in message bodies)
| is (finally) growing on me -- maybe that will go in during the
| big upgrade for new messages.

Dave
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Re: [abcusers] mail-archive.com, the spammer's friend

[Jack Campin]

>> They're probably subscribed to the abcusers list. Since you are a 
>> list subscriber, you can send majordomo a "who" command, and go through the 
>> entire list of abcuser subscribers, find any email addresses that look 
>> suspect. Then you can send them an email demanding to know if they are 
>> the bot they automatically archives the lists.

Thanks, I'll try that.


> Describing mail-archive.com as "filth" when they provide a useful, free,
> public service is a little OTT in my opinion; but then I feel that
> posting to a public list is tantamount to giving away your email address
> anyway.

This was NOT a public list when I joined it.  Only subscribers could
read any message on it.  As far as I'm concerned there was a contractual
obligation that it should stay that way.

I have repeatedly stated that I do NOT want any of my messages reposted
anywhere with the email address included.  What these scum are doing is
just plain theft.

It is hardly a "useful service" if it makes it practically impossible
for anyone to post to the list.  (I will be migrating to a new mail
provider over the next few months; no way in hell am I continuing my
subscription to this list from the new address, given this sort of
exposure).


> It appears that the web pages are obfuscated at the HTML level using
> "@" instead of "@". That will slow down some address-harvesters.

Given the sort of tricks spammers are already using to get at addresses,
the idea that that would provide any protection at all in the long run
isn't even a joke.  A mailing list archive is such a high-value target
for a spam harvester that they'll write special utilities to scan it
once they know of its existence. 

===  ===


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Re: [abcusers] mail-archive.com, the spammer's friend

[Phil Taylor]

John Chambers wrote:

>I wonder if it would be better to  send  such  messages  in
>Swedish or in English?


Arabic? Pushtun? Urdu? Farsi?

Phil Taylor


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Re: [abcusers] mail-archive.com, the spammer's friend

[John Chambers]

Henrik Norbeck writes:
| John Chambers wrote:
| > China.  Some people have said that they like to send back messages to
| > the postmaster thanking him for his support  for  Falun  Gong.   This
| > seems to get people off lists really fast ...
|
| So, can we send back spam messages from the US the same
| way to the postmaster, thanking for their support for Al-Qaida and
| the cause of Usama bin Ladin? Or maybe thanking them for the
| latest delivery of anthrax spores?

Sounds like an excellent idea to me.  I wouldn't  recommend
it  to  an  American citizen or resident.  But from Sweden,
there  is  probably  little  if  any  risk  from  your  own
authorities.

Thanking  someone  for  delivery  of  anthrax  spores   (or
anything  else)  might  not  be  a good idea, as that might
implicate you in a  transaction.   But  thanking  them  for
"support"  for al Qaeda or bin Laden is sufficiently vague,
since it usually just means they've said nice things.

I wonder if it would be better to  send  such  messages  in
Swedish or in English?

Let us know if you get any good responses.

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Re: [abcusers] mail-archive.com, the spammer's friend

[Henrik Norbeck]

John Chambers wrote:
> China.  Some people have said that they like to send back messages to
> the postmaster thanking him for his support  for  Falun  Gong.   This
> seems to get people off lists really fast ...

So, can we send back spam messages from the US the same 
way to the postmaster, thanking for their support for Al-Qaida and 
the cause of Usama bin Ladin? Or maybe thanking them for the 
latest delivery of anthrax spores?


Henrik Norbeck, Stockholm, Sweden
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://home.swipnet.se/hnorbeck/ My home page
http://home.swipnet.se/hnorbeck/abcmus/  AbcMus player program
http://home.swipnet.se/hnorbeck/abc.htm  >1600 ABC tunes
http://surf.to/blackthorn Irish trad music band
http://www.rfod.se/folklink/  Links to Swedish music
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Re: [abcusers] mail-archive.com, the spammer's friend

[John Chambers]

Laurie writes:
| > I apparently am now on my way to earning a PhD in 8 months. Cool! :-)
|
| 8 months is far too long for a PhD!  I've had many offers of "instant" ones.
| I'm hanging out for a D Phil.
|
| Meanwhile I shall making a fortune stuffing envelopes and taking part in
| "100% legal" pyramid selling schemes, cancelling all my debts on-line while
| I watch, and receiving (USA!) government grants that I never need to repay.
| I was going to spend some of it on "Over 250 MILLION Email Addresses for
| Sale from US$2 up" or perhaps "14.5 MILLION OPT-IN EMAIL ADDRESSES", but
| they all turned out to be aliases for John Chambers.

Hmmm ...  I'm not getting all those messages.  They must be  for  the
John Chambers who's the CEO of Cisco Systems.

Actually, on my web site I have a short list of pointers to  the  web
sites  of  a number of other John Chamberses.  I've only met a few of
them, though.  The one down in Florida who makes harps is a friend of
mine; we play music on many occasions during the 5 years that I lived
down there.

Isn't it great, all the important uses we've found for the Web?

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Re: [abcusers] mail-archive.com, the spammer's friend

[John Chambers]

| John Chambers wrote:
| > Toby writes:
| > |   On the positive side, I've been able to make a million dollars on the
| > | stock market, grow the length of my penis several inches, buy cheap real
| > | estate in South America, buy male growth hormone, help Nigerians in
| > | trouble, and meet single Russian women, all through the aid of spam.
| > | Ha..Ha..Ha.. :-)
| >
| > So have you enlarged your breasts, too?
|
|   I haven't received that particular spam message yet. My wife hasn't
| received that one yet either, they haven't changed since the last time I
| checked. However based on a message that landed in my inbox 15 minutes
| ago, I apparently am now on my way to earning a phD in 8 months. Cool! :-)

Last week, I was somewhat bemused to get a  penis-enlargement  and  a
breast-enlargement  ad  in  adjacent messages.  They weren't from the
same source, as far as I could tell; that would  have  made  it  even
funnier.

Sometimes I do wish I could tell those folks who send  me  the  large
messages  in  Chinese  that  they're wasting cpu cycles.  But I don't
suppose they would understand my messages.  I have been  disappointed
that  they all seem to come from .tw machines.  I've run across a fun
suggestion for dealing with spam relayed through machines in mainland
China.  Some people have said that they like to send back messages to
the postmaster thanking him for his support  for  Falun  Gong.   This
seems to get people off lists really fast ...

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Re: [abcusers] mail-archive.com, the spammer's friend

[Laurie (ukonline)]

> I apparently am now on my way to earning a PhD in 8 months. Cool! :-)

8 months is far too long for a PhD!  I've had many offers of "instant" ones.
I'm hanging out for a D Phil.

Meanwhile I shall making a fortune stuffing envelopes and taking part in
"100% legal" pyramid selling schemes, cancelling all my debts on-line while
I watch, and receiving (USA!) government grants that I never need to repay.
I was going to spend some of it on "Over 250 MILLION Email Addresses for
Sale from US$2 up" or perhaps "14.5 MILLION OPT-IN EMAIL ADDRESSES", but
they all turned out to be aliases for John Chambers.

Laurie


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Re: [abcusers] mail-archive.com, the spammer's friend

[Toby Rider]

John Chambers wrote:
> Toby writes:
> | John Chambers wrote:
> |
> | > (Perhaps we could also solve the problem  by  sending  form
> | > letters  to spammers pointing out that we are musicians, so
> | > most of us probably don't have enough  money  to  be  worth
> | > their attention.  ;-)
> |
> | Sigh.. I'm so used to spam. You can imagine how much spam I get
> | considering that all aliases on the servers like "webmaster" and "help"
> | point straight to my mailbox. Systems Administrators are like big spam
> | magnets.
> | On the positive side, I've been able to make a million dollars on the
> | stock market, grow the length of my penis several inches, buy cheap real
> | estate in South America, buy male growth hormone, help Nigerians in
> | trouble, and meet single Russian women, all through the aid of spam.
> | Ha..Ha..Ha.. :-)
> 
> So have you enlarged your breasts, too?


I haven't received that particular spam message yet. My wife hasn't 
received that one yet either, they haven't changed since the last time I 
checked. However based on a message that landed in my inbox 15 minutes 
ago, I apparently am now on my way to earning a phD in 8 months. Cool! :-)




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Re: [abcusers] mail-archive.com, the spammer's friend

[John Chambers]

Toby writes:
| John Chambers wrote:
|
| > (Perhaps we could also solve the problem  by  sending  form
| > letters  to spammers pointing out that we are musicians, so
| > most of us probably don't have enough  money  to  be  worth
| > their attention.  ;-)
|
|   Sigh.. I'm so used to spam. You can imagine how much spam I get
| considering that all aliases on the servers like "webmaster" and "help"
| point straight to my mailbox. Systems Administrators are like big spam
| magnets.
|   On the positive side, I've been able to make a million dollars on the
| stock market, grow the length of my penis several inches, buy cheap real
| estate in South America, buy male growth hormone, help Nigerians in
| trouble, and meet single Russian women, all through the aid of spam.
| Ha..Ha..Ha.. :-)

So have you enlarged your breasts, too?

;-)
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Re: [abcusers] mail-archive.com, the spammer's friend

[Starling]

Jack Campin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

: I occasionally trawl Google to see where my email address might have
: got to and find out who is responsible for the 200 spams a day I am
: now getting.  This is a new one that affects everybody here:

200 spams?  Goodness, that's a lot.  Have you considered changing
your email address?

: http://www.mail-archive.com/abcusers@argyll.wisemagic.com/msg04233.html
: 
: I don't know who those shitbags are, but they DO NOT have my permission
: to splash my email address over the Web where any scummy spammer can get
: hold of it.  

There is a need for obfuscated email addresses, sad as the prospect
may be.  As for ANY scummy spammer, read
http://www.mail-archive.com/faq.html#spam
For a public site, they do do a good job of blocking spambots.

: Reproducing my email address on a public forum is theft pure and simple.
: This is as bad as anything Yahoo gets up to.

?  It's not theft, I can't see any way to call it theft.  It's just
dangerous.  The worst spam I've gotten has been from people
blitzkrieging my email server with every possible email address,
anyway.  It's really the spammers we should be attacking, not the
email address reproducers.

You think Yahoo is bad?  mail.gnu.org's mailing lists are terrible!
I was on a list that was freely indexable even by valid search engine
spiders, with absolutely no address munging.  You can bet I got off
that list like nobody's business when I noticed that.

: How did these filth get hold of our list?

Someone subscribed them to our mailing list.  Probably not
mail-archive.com; they just encourage people to subscribe them to
mailing lists.


Starling
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Re: [abcusers] mail-archive.com, the spammer's friend

[Toby Rider]

John Chambers wrote:

> (Perhaps we could also solve the problem  by  sending  form
> letters  to spammers pointing out that we are musicians, so
> most of us probably don't have enough  money  to  be  worth
> their attention.  ;-)

Sigh.. I'm so used to spam. You can imagine how much spam I get 
considering that all aliases on the servers like "webmaster" and "help" 
point straight to my mailbox. Systems Administrators are like big spam 
magnets.
On the positive side, I've been able to make a million dollars on the 
stock market, grow the length of my penis several inches, buy cheap real 
estate in South America, buy male growth hormone, help Nigerians in 
trouble, and meet single Russian women, all through the aid of spam. 
Ha..Ha..Ha.. :-)


Toby




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Re: [abcusers] mail-archive.com, the spammer's friend

[John Chambers]

Dave writes:
| On Wed, Aug 14, 2002 at 06:36:17PM -0700, Toby Rider wrote:
| > They're probably subscribed to the abcusers list. Since you are a
| > list subscriber, you can send majordomo a "who" command, and go through the
| > entire list of abcuser subscribers, find any email addresses that look
| > suspect. Then you can send them an email demanding to know if they are
| > the bot they automatically archives the lists.
|
...
| Describing mail-archive.com as "filth" when they provide a useful, free,
| public service is a little OTT in my opinion; but then I feel that
| posting to a public list is tantamount to giving away your email address
| anyway.

Generally true.  They seem to have done a bit of  obscuring
of email addresses, but not all that much. Of course, for a
mailing list to be useful, the members do generally want to
send  email  to each other directly.  Some replies are best
sent to  the  list,  while  others  are  best  sent  to  an
individual.  There's really no logical way out of this.

We might note that this sort of archive is  generally  less
of  a  problem  than  the growing "harvesting" of addresses
that commercial ISPs and "backbone" sites  are  doing.   In
other  fora,  there has been a fair amount of discussion of
the fact that some of the  big  guys  (especially  msn  and
yahoo) consider all traffic going through their machines to
be their property.  There was a bit of a fuss a year or  so
back  when  people found that msn.com was extracting things
like images from email and using them  in  ads.   Recently,
yahoo  decided  without  any  notification that their email
lists were sellable unless users "opted out" by using a web
page  that  wasn't  publicised  and  couldn't  be  found by
searching their email signup pages.  If your email  address
is  known  to  msn/hotmail or yahoo, you should expect that
your address has been sold to spammers.

But the case that Jack found probably wasn't like this;  it
was probably spammers discovering the mail-archive site and
extracting addresses from the mail headers.  We oughta  be,
uh,  "discussing" this with them.  It does appear that they
are at least somewhat aware of the problem.  If we  discuss
it  reasonably,  there's a chance that they will do more to
hide email addresses. But this is inherently something that
can't  be done completely without killing what is after all
a rather valuable net resource.

BTW, there is a lot of precedent for mailing lists policing
their membership lists.  This was started back in the 80's,
by a number of technical lists on biological  topics.   Any
list  with  open  membership found themselves under serious
assault by creationists, who  would  flood  the  list  with
flame  wars.   The only solution was strict controls on who
could join the list,  and  rapid  eviction  of  any  member
submitted creationist flames.

There was also the group in Turkey that scanned  lists  and
newsgroups for any mention of terms like "Kurd" or "Israel"
and flooded the lists with inflammatory  political  tracts.
This  was solved only by some rather strong countermeasures
that identified the  (rapidly  changing)  sources  of  such
messages and deleted them.

The current topic isn't this extreme.  But it is reasonable
to  discuss  whether  we  want  to  allow  this  list to be
archived in a public fashion, and  if  not,  how  we  evict
abusers.

I'd think that it's of benefit to the abc user community to
permit fairly open enrollment in abcusers.  Perhaps what we
really need is occasional notice that this is a *very* open
list, and members should expect that their email address is
very exposed.

(Perhaps we could also solve the problem  by  sending  form
letters  to spammers pointing out that we are musicians, so
most of us probably don't have enough  money  to  be  worth
their attention.  ;-)

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Re: [abcusers] mail-archive.com, the spammer's friend

[Dave Holland]

On Thu, Aug 15, 2002 at 09:29:43AM +0100, Dave Holland wrote:
> http://www.mail-archive.com/faq.html#spam does say that email addresses
> will be obfuscated when they are present in the archive, but as Jack
> noted, it's not always done. I will report that.

It appears that the web pages are obfuscated at the HTML level using
"@" instead of "@". That will slow down some address-harvesters.
If you think more obfuscation is necessary, I think you need to start
lobbying.

(This is rather off-topic, so I'll shut up now.)

Dave
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Re: [abcusers] mail-archive.com, the spammer's friend

[Dave Holland]

On Wed, Aug 14, 2002 at 06:36:17PM -0700, Toby Rider wrote:
>   They're probably subscribed to the abcusers list. Since you are a 
>   list subscriber, you can send majordomo a "who" command, and go through the 
> entire list of abcuser subscribers, find any email addresses that look 
> suspect. Then you can send them an email demanding to know if they are 
> the bot they automatically archives the lists.

According to http://www.mail-archive.com/about.html
the relevant subscriber address would be: archive@jab.org

http://www.mail-archive.com/faq.html#spam does say that email addresses
will be obfuscated when they are present in the archive, but as Jack
noted, it's not always done. I will report that.

Describing mail-archive.com as "filth" when they provide a useful, free,
public service is a little OTT in my opinion; but then I feel that
posting to a public list is tantamount to giving away your email address
anyway.

Dave
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Re: [abcusers] mail-archive.com, the spammer's friend

[Toby Rider]

They're probably subscribed to the abcusers list. Since you are a list 
subscriber, you can send majordomo a "who" command, and go through the 
entire list of abcuser subscribers, find any email addresses that look 
suspect. Then you can send them an email demanding to know if they are 
the bot they automatically archives the lists.

Toby


Jack Campin wrote:
> I occasionally trawl Google to see where my email address might have
> got to and find out who is responsible for the 200 spams a day I am
> now getting.  This is a new one that affects everybody here:
> 
> http://www.mail-archive.com/abcusers@argyll.wisemagic.com/msg04233.html
> 
> I don't know who those shitbags are, but they DO NOT have my permission
> to splash my email address over the Web where any scummy spammer can get
> hold of it.  I have been ABSOLUTELY EXPLICIT about that on many occasions.
> Reproducing my email address on a public forum is theft pure and simple.
> This is as bad as anything Yahoo gets up to.
> 
> How did these filth get hold of our list?
> 
> Who's feeding it to them?
> 
> And how do we get them off the Internet?
> 
> ===  ===
> 
> 
> To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: 
>http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
> 



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[abcusers] mail-archive.com, the spammer's friend

[Jack Campin]

I occasionally trawl Google to see where my email address might have
got to and find out who is responsible for the 200 spams a day I am
now getting.  This is a new one that affects everybody here:

http://www.mail-archive.com/abcusers@argyll.wisemagic.com/msg04233.html

I don't know who those shitbags are, but they DO NOT have my permission
to splash my email address over the Web where any scummy spammer can get
hold of it.  I have been ABSOLUTELY EXPLICIT about that on many occasions.
Reproducing my email address on a public forum is theft pure and simple.
This is as bad as anything Yahoo gets up to.

How did these filth get hold of our list?

Who's feeding it to them?

And how do we get them off the Internet?

===  ===


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