Re: mailto:

2018-02-20 Thread Rob Kendrick 
On Tue, Feb 20, 2018 at 09:02:57AM +, Richard Torrens (lists) wrote:
> 
> This system appears to defeat spammers - most of the email addresses that
> have been spammed seem to have been harvested from computers by malware.

We're getting dangerously off-topic here, but they mostly harvest them from:
- usenet and mailing lists such as this (they are so bountiful,
  the harvesters simply special-case the mitigations that
  mailing list archival websites use to obscure addresses)

- brute-forcing people's email passwords, not only to send spam
  through but to harvest addresses from your INBOX and address
  book.

- Guesswork.  Attempting to send an email is cheap, so when you
  get a list of current domains, you simply try all the common
  stuff, like "lists" or "tim".

Doing it on your website with mailto: links isn't worth it these days,
spidering the web like that is comparitively expensive compared to the
above techniques.

B.

Re Wikipedia (OT)

2018-02-20 Thread Jim Nagel 
Tim Hill  wrote on 19 Feb:
> Even Wikipedia gets this right.

If it didn't, then of course it would now, because you surely have 
signed up for an account as one of the crowd-sourced and peer-reviewed 
editors and you would have contributed the required correction.

-- 
Jim Nagel www.archivemag.co.uk
|| See you at the show?   www.riscos-swshow.co.uk   Feb 24

Re: mailto:

2018-02-20 Thread Richard Torrens (lists) 
In article <56ccf68de6...@timil.com>,
   Tim Hill  wrote:

> Coincidentally, I have just been adding 'munge' to
> http://timil.com/riscos and IME this conversion of a mailto link into
> entities seems enough to prevent harvesting by spammers. Or the ones that
> do are so useless it doesn't even reach me!
 
My script required a hidden variable be sent - the variable determines the
script action.

This system appears to defeat spammers - most of the email addresses that
have been spammed seem to have been harvested from computers by malware.

-- 
Richard Torrens.
http://www.Torrens.org for genealogy, natural history, wild food, walks, cats
and more!