winehq mailing list archives being harvested by spammers

[Mike Hearn]

Yes, I've noticed that in the past few weeks it's become particularly
bad. I have no idea why there's suddenly such a huge volume, my spam
traps don't seem to filter the new stuff out for some reason.

On Thu, 2003-04-24 at 17:24, Dan Kegel wrote:
> Hi,
> executive summary: "please obscure the email addresses in the
> winehq mailing list archives, I'm drowning in spam"!
> 
> I am facing a tidal wave of spam.  Recent research showed that
> the main way spammers get email addresses is by web crawling.
> Therefore, I'm doing a web search for my work email address
> (dank at ixiacom.com), and doing my best to erase all mention of it.
> I hate doing this, but the spam is getting so bad I have to do something,
> and spam filtering isn't quite doing the job.
> I expect others are now or will soon be in the same situation.
> 
> Most mentions of my work address are in web archives of mailing lists.
> While many mailing lists have instituted some privacy controls,
> many others have not.
> 
> Here's a couple examples of archived messages containing my work address:
> http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-users/2001/09/0474.html
> http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-devel/2003/02/0190.html
> I have no specific evidence the wine archives in particular
> have been harvested by spammers, but if Google can see my
> address there, so can they...
> 
> Examples of effective privacy measures for mailing list archives
> include:
>    * restricting archive access to list members
>    * not restricting access, but using the HTTP password mechanism
>      to discourage spiders (e.g. perforce-users mailing list)
>    * simply obscuring all email addresses in message headers or trailers
> That last countermeasure is my favorite one, since it means that
> Google will still have full access to the info in the list archive.
> 
> I would greatly appreciate it if the archive would institute one of
> the above spam countermeasures (preferably the last one).
> I understand that overly harsh spam countermeasures would be
> harmful to normal discourse, but I trust some useful middle
> ground can be found.
> 
> Thanks,
> Dan Kegel