On Jan 29, 2004, at 7:49 PM, lukas wrote:
Hi folks,
since I'm posting to this list, I receive more and more viruses every day. A few minutes ago, I received a bounced virus-mail reputedly sent by me.
the only mailing list i am subscribed to at this address is gentoo-user. i have never posted this address on the internet anywhere.
i *NEVER* received spam before signing up on gentoo-user, and now i receive about *1 MB* of spam/viruses each day. therefore it's obvious that gentoo-user is the source of the spam and viruses.
now, guess what? go to google groups (dejanews, whatever) and look at the group linux.gentoo.user. i believe that's where and how the spam/virus programs harvest addresses.
it is incredibly naive on google's part to do such a stupid thing as not hide email addresses, like mail-archive does. how can we prevent gentoo-user from being archived on google, or stop google from making email addresses public information?
j.
I have noticed this problem as well on other mailing lists ( f.i. the debian-user list, which is a high volume mailing list... ). The archive google is keeping up to date is in the first position absolutely respectable.
Actually mailing lists have been kept archived for some years. ( note for instance the original newsgroup post of Linus Torvalds. Now those posts have been kept in the purpose of serving people searching for information. Neither you nor me want to answer all the time the same questions, nor am I interested in asking a question similar to the one somebody asked already on the list / on the net. There are certainly more and more people not searching for information / help before they post on a list, but at least for those who keep up the good manors, let's give them a chance to find what they are searching for.
Now certainly email addresses haven't to be published in the archives, to transmit the information. But if you would like to ask somebody who replied to the question/mail, or add some feedback, you will be glad to be able to put your hands on the persons email address, i am sure about that.
Even if the spam problem can't be ignored, it 's definetly not google's fault to "publish" the emails with the archives. Actually, the biggest problem concerning the reign of the spam ( who is representing about 40% of all the emails ) is for instance the address book on windows, and the unawareness of windows users on the list. Outlook ( Express ), as most serious mail clients do as well, is keeping book of all the emails the user get s email from. Those collected addresses are like waiting for a ( mostly windows-user, we must admit it ) to get spy ware, which is fairly easily achieved. Now this spy ware can "read" the list of mail addresses and sends them back to their home server ( E.T. phenomena ).
I guess, thought I am absolutely not sure, that this is the problem where the spam "servers/senders/whatever" get their mail addresses from.
Just blaming one crawler, in this case google, to be responsible for all the spam people might get is naive, IMO.
I can be totally wrong thought, but that's my point of view, and my 0.02€ to the topic.
-- Bob Hentges | .''`. http://bob.hentges.lu/ | : :' : -- | `. `'` ASCII Ribbon Campaign | `- Say No to HTML in EMail and News | proud Debian -- | user and admin
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