On Wed, May 31, 2006 at 03:03:34PM +1000, Jamie Wilkinson wrote:
[...]
> >
> >I agree with that. It obfuscates the email address when it displays the
> >actual post, but the email address is in clear, and hence harvestable,
> >when you look at the search lists.
>
> Which definition of munged are you using? yes it's human readable, but it's
> not immediately obvious to a robot that it's an email address.
And this is the key point -- there are so many totally unmunged addresses for
spammer to harvest that it's generally considered that even trivial munging is
adequate protection. It's not worth spam harvesters time to do even trivial
unmunging, so they don't.
(I'd be mildly interested in a good reference for this commonly made claim, I
know I've seen one somewhere before.)
I have no doubt that gmane would notice if an automated harvester did start
trawling their site -- I'm sure they value their bandwidth, and would improve
their munging if they thought it would make a real impact on their bandwidth use
and server load.
Some quick and dirty stats: since May 1st, at the email address I use for slug
lists (and only slug lists), I received:
* 288 spams addressed to my email address. Of these, only 3 made it through
my filters.
* 24 spams addressed to the list
This of course says nothing about where the spammers harvested the addresses
from. What it *does* tell me is that I don't care at all about the current
level of spam I get from being subscribed to, and posting to, slug lists. The
amount beating my filter is negligible.
Threads about spam on slug always waste far more of my time than the spam itself
ever does.
-Andrew.
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