[Elecraft] Re: Spam alert

[Martin AC6RM]

Y'all:  we've probably taken this topic a litle too far, especially since
we're dealing mostly with supposition in regards to this specific archive.

But we ALL have had an excellent Elecraft experience, and, frankly, "the
list" -- and it's archive -- should be no different: an excellent
experience.

A few notes:

Having email addresses in the archives can and has proven valuable to list
members (and, I suspect, non-list-members) in following up on questions
and answers posted in history.  So there's obviously a trade-off.

A search engine is very different from a spambot; the search engine is
crawling looking for words and associations, not for characters.  One's
email address / domain combination is a very close association of words
that scores high on the association, not necessarily because it's an email
address.  The search engine will render what it finds, which is two
matches on a close association and an escaped character.

That said, pattern matching software will ultimately catch up with the
list archive software engineers (which I'm not; I just install it and run
it) and these guy's'll leapfrog, just like the car manufacturers leapfrog
with us morons who drive.  For us configurers/sysops, theoretically, the
instant I change email addresses to display as "joe(at)mydomain.com"
instead of "joe%40;mydomain.com", the bots'll pick up on it (by the way,
that's a big job for me; not trivial).

In the mean time, a pretty-much fool-proof solution for y'all:

1.  create a new email account SPECIFICALLY for this list (creating
alternate email accounts has actually been covered on this list before;
check the ... err ... archives :)   If you have serious trouble doing
this, but really want to, contact me directly -- off-list -- and I will
help you.
2.  filter anything that doesn't have "[Elecraft]" in the subject line in
to the "spam" folder.  Pretty much every email client on the market or in
the public domain has at least this very primitive filtering ability --
even the web-based ones (I use squirrelmail m'self).
3.  Contribute often to the list; your input is VALUABLE and USEABLE!
4.  Check your spam folder once in a while, cuz list members, or
archive-cruisers might email you with a question and may not have put the
"[Elecraft]" in the subject line.

Given the highly constructive nature of this list, and the very high value
of its contributors, and the fact that y'all are a SMART bunch, I'll
consider the above pretty much due dilligence.  In other words, me -- Mr.
sysop -- is never going to totally defeat the spammers.  As a sysop, I'm
giving you advice.  If you choose not to follow it and get spammed, well,
....  just don't BUY anything from a spammer; it just encourages them!

In the mean time, if you suspect you're getting spam as a result of
participating in this list, I WOULD like to get the details.

Now, where were we -- Eric was about to announce cool stuff being released
at Dayton ... and we were watching a very interesting discussion on the
keying wave form of the K2, and double-dual receiver advantages for 40m
contesters (still haven't worked this out in my brain yet and I really
wanna be a CW contester one day).  Let's tune back in ... :)

73, Martin AC6RM
k2/100#3021--an excellent experience by all accounts


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said: Thu, 1 May 2003 21:20:21 -0700

Not to quibble (well ok, I am), but I don't get why there is an assumption
the spambots are dumber than the search engines.

I can do a google search on my address and get hits in the elecraft
archives, in spite of the escaping of "@". Why would spambot software have
trouble doing the same thing?
<snip>