[consulting] OT: Spam

[Gary Feldman]

Tim Kehres wrote:
> It is not uncommon for spammers to troll for the names and email addresses
> of list contributors and then use those addresses as the originator address
> in their spams.   I've been seeing this on many of the IETF lists for some
> time now.  The only real solution that I've been able to sort out is more
> active moderation on the part of the list maintainer.  Fortunately mailman
> provides some pretty good tools for this.
>   
I'm not sure what you're saying.  The IETF archive doesn't do anything 
sophisticated to hide email addresses.  It seems to just replace the "@" 
with " at ".  So that can be harvested automatically, without 
subscribing to the lists.

The Drupal archives, on the other hand, hide the domain name entirely.  
There should be no way to find the domain name by scraping the archives 
(at least there's no obvious way).  Are you suggesting instead that 
spammers are actually subscribing to the mailing list, and downloading 
the subscribers list or scraping the email they receive? 

I don't see how active moderation pertains, since the lists are 
generally unmoderated.  Or do you mean management of the lists, and if 
so, how?

Gary