I think this is a legitimate concern. I definitely noticed an increase in spam after a little time and a few posts to the list. Though MS Outlook's spam filter is surprisingly effective, not all filters are created equal, and some services which access email directly from the ISP either do not or cannot practically employ robust filtering. I find spam and the unethical people behind it particularly distasteful and go to some length to keep my addresses out of places where they may be picked up. However, not everyone runs their own domain or has the time to bother with multiple and potentially disposable email addresses. As much as I like reading the list and looking for opportunities to contribute, I am probably eventually going to get off of it in order to preserve this email address for a while longer.
Another consideration is for those folks who may use an email address from their place of employment. This is generally not a good idea and often against company policy, but for some may be the best or preferred option. Getting that address flooded with spam is not a good thing. I understand the desire both to keep the list easily accessible and provide the opportunity to reply personally to a message. The latter I am sure keeps the traffic manageable. However, perhaps a minimum effort to keep email addresses from proliferating across the internet is in order. Maybe a click-through option similar to what is now seen on Yahoo Group distributions would provide at least another hoop for the spam bots to jump through while keeping ease of use relatively intact. Larry -----Original Message----- From: Aaron Smith [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, July 17, 2009 7:51 AM To: C. Richcreek Enterprises Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: GW Micro is a great cause of all the spam? Craig, Thanks for your comments. I should first point out that Bill hasn't been employed with GW Micro for some time now. So you might want to update your address book. Second, the GW-Info email list is a public discussion forum. You can view archives on our website at www.gwmicro.com/gwinfo. Google is a service designed to index public websites, and provide a search mechanism for finding content. I'm sure you can deduce that a service designed to index public web sites indexing a collection of public discussions would indeed result in being able to locate your email address. It is true that we could take some measure to obfuscate email addresses in these public forums. But there are other services which subscribe to our email lists for the sole purpose of archiving the content publicly which also make email addresses available for public viewing and consumption. For that reason, I never took the time to implement any kind of obfuscation technology. I also felt the ability to contact an author of a message through the archive interface outweighed the possibility of having email addresses harvested for ill gotten gain. I still feel that to be the case. I hope that helps explain the rather benign debacle you've recently encountered. Aaron On 7/16/2009 7:17 PM, C. Richcreek Enterprises wrote: > Hi Bill, I have been an ardent user of WindowEyes only, since VocalEyes > but today I find out that your info support list is listing my Email > Address all over on Google. This is a serious dis-service to all of the > members that ask or answer lister's questions on the Info list. I hope > that you all can find a much better way to not be doing that? All the > tech at my ISP, had to do was just put my email address into Google and > your Info list came right up complete with my email address? This is no > security, at all, for your clients, I have been very careful to always > read the privacy documents to where ever I create an account for > shopping, Software purchases etc. and it seems that it has been a > definite waist of time. To find out that my favorite company is freely > listing my email address all over the web is unconscionable. Have any of > you even thought about this problem? I should hope so. Thank you, Craig > B. Richcreek -- To insure that you receive proper support, please include all past correspondence (where applicable), and any relevant information pertinent to your situation when submitting a problem report to the GW Micro Technical Support Team. Aaron Smith GW Micro Phone: 260/489-3671 Fax: 260/489-2608 WWW: http://www.gwmicro.com FTP: ftp://ftp.gwmicro.com Technical Support & Web Development If you reply to this message it will be delivered to the original sender only. If your reply would benefit others on the list and your message is related to GW Micro, then please consider sending your message to [email protected] so the entire list will receive it. All GW-Info messages are archived at http://www.gwmicro.com/gwinfo, and can be searched through and sorted using the search form at the bottom of the page. If you wish to unsubscribe from this list, send a message to [email protected] and include leave gw-info in the body of the message. If you reply to this message it will be delivered to the original sender only. If your reply would benefit others on the list and your message is related to GW Micro, then please consider sending your message to [email protected] so the entire list will receive it. All GW-Info messages are archived at http://www.gwmicro.com/gwinfo, and can be searched through and sorted using the search form at the bottom of the page. If you wish to unsubscribe from this list, send a message to [email protected] and include leave gw-info in the body of the message.
