[wellylug] Personal info on the mailing list

[Grant McLean]

On Wed, 2005-06-15 at 10:57 +1200, Nick Jensen wrote:
> Surely it's only a matter of time before a spider crawls over the
> archives and harvests the email addresses of pretty much everyone on
> this list who has ever posted and had a reply.

1. make that: 'has ever had a reply from someone whose mail client put
   the original sender's email address in the *body* of the message'
   - a much smaller set.

2. I have heard from an anti-spam insider that harvesting of email
   addresses from web pages doesn't really happen much any more because
   it's too much work.  The easier option is Windows/Outlook worms that
   harvest addresses from people's address books and send them back to
   spammers.  If a person who is susceptible to such worms is on a
   mailing list, then the address of any poster to the list could end
   up in their address book regardless of whether the address is in the
   web archive (which it probably isn't - see 1).

Conclusion - don't sweat it.

Cheers
Grant