Re: hiding e-mail adresses needed badly

On Thu, Oct 16, 2003 at 04:43:27AM -0500, Peter Schultz wrote:
> At this point in time it's downright irresponsible not to hide our 
> addresses.
> 
> I've been lurking on this list about a month to get caught up with 
> -current issues.  Friday was both the first mail I sent to the list,
> and the first use of this e-mail address.  The only incoming mail was 
> from the FreeBSD lists I subscribed to.  However, since that fateful 
> e-mail I have been viciously attacked by spammers posing as Microsoft 
> security updaters.  These spams include attachments making them all 
> around 150KB in size.  Maybe others of you have seen them?

I guess you are referring to the W32.Swen worm?  I guess most people
have seen that one by now.

> 
> As far as I can tell, these guys are targeting the FreeBSD lists, 
> exploiting them terribly!  This list's charter states that spam will be 
> blocked.  Please enforce the list charter, with prejudice.

The FreeBSD lists are not targeted specially.
That worm mainly harvests e-mail addresses from newsgroups (and from
files stored on infected computers.)
There are several mail<->news gateways for this list (and other freebsd
lists), so this is probably where it got your mail-address.
Since these gateways are not under the control of FreeBSD.org there
isn't much that can be done about it.
These spams are mainly not sent through the lists so they can't be
blocked there (even though lots and lots of spam is blocked by the
FreeBSD list servers.)

> 
> It would be best if subscribers could just choose to have their address 
> published or not.  I can understand being so dedicated to the cause that 
> you're willing to take on some spam.  Non-subscribers addresses should 
> definitely not be published.
> 
> Sincerely,
> Pete...
> 
> Wilko Bulte wrote:
> >On Wed, Oct 15, 2003 at 03:29:21PM +0400, Andrey Chernov wrote:
> >
> >
> >I fail to see why this is relevant to -current but OK.. I think that
> >the opportunity to do this has long since passed. Just type your name
> >in Google and see what happens..
> >
> >Wilko
> >
> >
> >>Due to increased activity of SPAM harvesters what are our plans to hide 
> >>our addresses from public WWW? I mean all browseable mailing lists, 
> >>FreeBSD site, CVS via WWW, PRs, ports and docs.

Note that there are many web-archives of the mailing lists. Lots of
them are run by other people.  You need to talk to them too.

> >>
> >>As I think, simple <user [at] domain.com> form will be enough to stop 
> >>them.
> >>

-- 
<Insert your favourite quote here.>
Erik Trulsson
ertr1013_at_student.uu.se