| gabriel rosenkoetter on 16 Oct 2003 17:41:04 -0400 |
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On Thu, Oct 16, 2003 at 08:13:23AM -0400, Kevin Brosius wrote: > One study suggested that munging cut ~80% of spam on new email > addresses. I'll see if I can locate a reference. Please do, because I'd like to read it. For the record, I object to munging mostly on principal. Here are my reasons, in order of importance (to me): 1. The idea that we would break our historical record in fear of petty abusers of the Internet is offensive. Spammers won't stop spamming because they don't get your address, they probably won't even stop spamming you (because there are plenty of other channels for them to get your address). They will stop spamming precisely when it becomes financially contraindicated. So filter their mail. Get you friends and family who don't know better reading mail through your mail server, and filter it for them too. And support GOOD (and there's plenty of bad been proposed, so watch out) legislation to make the process illegal without informed consent. 2. It really does break the historical record. PGP signatures don't work (they don't anyway in the Mailman web interface, but they still do in the mbox versions). And keeping the real email addresses acessible really is necessary even outside of that. Twenty years from know, the PLUG mail archive will probably still be around somewhere, though many of us may not still be on the mailing list. A lot of very good information goes through PLUG all the time. It'd be a disservice to the future to make it difficult for someone down the line to follow up on something mentioned here. 3. Email address munging doesn't work anyway. It *might* make the exponential curve of the amount of spam you're going to receive rise a little bit more slowly. But it won't stop that rise. Only proper spam filtering will stop that rise. The suggesting that email munging stops spam is a red herring that I really wish smart people would quit supporting already. > The general consensus seems to be that email harvestors aren't bothering > to de-munge addresses (yet). Whether that will continue or not is > anyone's guess. I know that's untrue, because I've seen the Perl code to do it. In point of fact, I think it's in CPAN. Yeah. Boo! > I posted this same comment here about 2-3 years ago after I had changed > jobs, received a new email address at work, subscribed to plug, and > started receiving a lot of spam shortly thereafter. I might have blamed > it on friends with infected windows PC's outside the company, but I > don't have many of them :) Blaming anyone but the spammers for sending you spam is migrating blame unfairly. Blaming anyone but yourself (or your ISP, in the case that you're doing IMAP or POP across a dialup) for actually receiving that spam is also placing blame unfairly. Filter your email. It's really just not that hard, and it's a reality we need to all just shut the hell up and accept. -- gabriel rosenkoetter gr@eclipsed.net Attachment:
pgpPTrt6sg8Rs.pgp
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