Re: [cobalt-users] Cobalt Users Message Board (was: Cobalt user chatroom????)

["Steve Werby" <steve-lists@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"Wayne Sagar" <wsagar@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> The messages would be a lot less likely to wind up on google.. and though
> this would thwart Dan in his searches.. I'm not at ALL comfortable with
the
> fact these messages are going onto the search engines.. I screwed up and
> used my actual email account and my spam ratio has gone through the roof
> since joining this list.

It's safe to assume that any public mailing list you subscribe to probably
has multiple public web archives.  I've personally setup a web archive of
this list and I've come across at least two public web archives of this list
besides those maintained by Cobalt.  Since anyone subscribed to a mailing
list can easily create a public web-based archive and anyone subscribed to a
mailing list can use a simple script to extract all email addresses from a
file containing thousands of messages, anytime you use your email address
you're at risk.  You've probably noticed that a lot of websites and
web-based archives use obfuscation to change the format of email addresses
to one that spambots won't recognize as easily.  It didn't take the
programmers of spambots long to catch on.

Both of the following are easily recognized as email addresses and parsed
accordingly by spambots that go to the trouble to parse content for them:

steve@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
steve at befriend dot com

If you get as much spam as I do, you might want to look into setting up
filters using procmail and possibly even installing an elaborate set of
procmail recipes such as those provided by Spam Bouncer
<http://www.spambouncer.org/>.

--
Steve Werby
President, Befriend Internet Services LLC
http://www.befriend.com/