g'day,
Anthony Atkielski wrote:
...
Someone she corresponds with blasts an email to
a bunch of folks leaving all addresses exposed,
and one of the addressees does some action which
exposes the email to a spammer's harvesting process?
This is getting more and more farfetched.
Oh, really now...
Anthony, please don't take this the wrong way, but it's really starting
to look either like you don't know enough to extrapolate out from your
own experience, or you're just trolling.
Consider the following randomly chosen message from Dave Farber's IP
list from earlier today:
----------8<----------8<----------8<----------8<----------8<----------
cut here cut here cut here cut here cut here
Subject: [IP] more on Stopping spam isn't as easy as you might
hope
Date: Sat, 31 May 2003 13:07:01 -0400
From: Dave Farber <dave(_at_)farber(_dot_)net>
To: ip(_at_)v2(_dot_)listbox(_dot_)com
Date: Sat, 31 May 2003 12:49:42 -0400
From: Meng Weng Wong <mengwong(_at_)dumbo(_dot_)xxxxx(_dot_)com>
Subject: Re: [IP] Stopping spam isn't as easy as you might hope
To: johnl(_at_)xxxx(_dot_)com
Cc: Dave Farber <dave(_at_)farber(_dot_)net>
Date: Sat, 31 May 2003 04:01:08 -0400
From: John R Levine <johnl(_at_)xxxx(_dot_)com>
The social problem with designated sender is that there are plenty of
perfectly legitimate reasons for mail from a domain to originate someplace
other than its home network. Lots of people maintain accounts at Yahoo or
other free mail providers, but send mail with their Yahoo address from
their home ISP using the ISP's mail server.
MUAs should add a configuration field to distinguish header "From:"
vs. envelope from. That solves this problem. If they choose not to
do this, they should send mail through Yahoo's web interface. That's
a fair constraint. Yahoo gives them free email; in return, they're
supposed to give Yahoo their eyeballs.
...
----------8<----------8<----------8<----------8<----------8<----------
cut here cut here cut here cut here cut here
Observe that this message contained not one, but two additional email
addresses besides Dave's and the list address Note also, that the folks
over there are pounding on this problem, as well (nd for those few
who've been out of the galaxy, Dave's list is a distilled collection of
posts, most of which are forwarded to him, so almost every posting Dave
sends on has at least one email address in it. Some, including this
randomly chosen example, have more.)
Note, there's nothing special about the IP list in this case, I just
used it because Dave's list is the next one in my mailbox after the IETF
list, so I didn't have to go far to find a refutation of your claim.
Most Usenet groups would probably turn up an example or two, if you
bothered to go look. Note also that as a curtesy, I've blanked the
domain names in this example, but this is a formality, since this list
is available in a public archive, so you don't even need to subscribe to
harvest it...
Or more explicitly, someone she knows copies her
in a post to a mailing list which is being harvested.
A list to which she doesn't belong? Again, this seems unlikely.
see above...
The point being that it isn't difficult to end up
in the spammer's email address lists.
I have quite a few addresses that remain untouched. Only the ones for which
an obvious harvesting path exists have received spam.
Please stop thinking the entire world is just like you. It's not, so
behaving like it is can be quite counterproductive (not to mention
downright harmful if engineering decisions actually get made based upon
your ignorance).
Put another way, I'm happy for you that spam is not yet a major problem
for you. It's a major problem for lots of people on this list. More
importantly, it's perceived to be a growing problem for the rest of the
Internet, for which a solution will be needed in the not too distant
future, so people on this list are discussing the near future, not
*your* particular present reality. Your "but it's not a problem for me"
reaction is more than distracting, it's downright counter-productive in
this context.
- peterd
--
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Peter Deutsch pdeutsch(_at_)gydig(_dot_)com
Gydig Software
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are
dreamt of in your philosophy."
- Hamlet, Act I, Scene V
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