[R-390] Re: OT - BUT - Very PERTINENT

[Tom Norris]

Bob --

That is an *EXCELLENT* idea. Yahoo does not show emails
in its archives unless someone does not trim the headers
in a reply or includes it in a sig line. Not sure how easy
it would be for the mailman list software to do.

It's *very* easy to spoof email addresses. A bit harder
to spoof IPs but easy enough a 14 year old could do it.

The spam harvesting software out there these days
is phenomenal, it can "spider" millions of web sites,
usenet and email servers. While the web sites
are public and an easy harvest, some news, FTP and
mail servers might take more work. These programs
scan and bang away till it finds a hole to sneak
into and can harvests from these too.

The spam packages I find the most annoying are the
ones who simply scan the net for domain names, then
generate a methodical list of possible users and
mass send to a particular domain, making a record
per domain of bounced emails so it won't try
them again next time.

Most of these programs can harvest and generate
millions of addresses per day.


>
>For Don and Al, STRONGLY suggest closing access to Email addresses 
>in OPEN ACCESS archives!  This would REALLY reduce probabilities of 
>additional occurrences.
>
>It would restrict the possibilities to list members only.
>
>Bob - N0DGN