[ale]OT It begins...

[ChangingLINKS.com]

> | Speaking on behalf of spammers, "we" DON'T want to email those who go
> through
> | the trouble to munge their email addresses.
> 
> Actually, there have been spammers who have paid minimum-wage workers to
> sit and go through newsgroup postings, de-munging by hand.  Definitely
> comes close to proving Rule 3.
> 
> Ben

Not to be argumentative, but that seems far-fetched because email addresses 
are so easy to get. I know how to collect more email addresses (and relevant 
data that will help make a "sale") automatically in 1 hour than I can in an 
entire day of hand collecting. In order for the hand collecting to be worth 
it, the ROI of the hand collected email addresses would have to be thousands 
of times higher. Thousands.

Further, once this "super email collection facility" HAND collected these 
extremely profitable email addresses, they would have to release the data to 
other spammers (or be bent on overusing the list) for it to cause a major 
problem for the email address owners. 

Point: The spammers who would go as far as creating such a sweat shop would 
already have the science of advertising, marketing, ROI and spamming mastered 
(and thus less likely to make marketing mistakes like overusing a list).

I don't doubt that you heard a story about sweat shops full of people 
harvesting emails by hand, but I also don't doubt that you have heard a story 
of a sweat shop full of little people building toys for children all over the 
world located to the North.

My position is that we SHOULD do what we can to minimize spam - server side.
As it is, our current archives are LESS secure than Windows. 

Does anyone have a server side solution?
-- 
Wishing you Happiness, Joy and Laughter,
Drew Brown
http://www.ChangingLINKS.com