[wellylug] Personal info on the mailing list

[Nick Jensen]

On 6/15/05, Grant McLean <grantsemailaddresshere> wrote:
> 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.

Fair enough, but it does happen. When I google your email address, for
example, I get 15 hits on the WellyLUG archives.

> 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.

Good enough for me. Thanks.

Nick