[ale] Webcrawlers can harvest ALE Archive E-mail Addresses

[Michael Hirsch]

On Thu, 10 Feb 2005 09:51:26 -0500, Jim Popovitch <jimpop at yahoo.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-02-10 at 12:59 +0000, Greg Sabino Mullane wrote:
> > Poppycock. There are plenty of mailing list archives out there
> > that make /some/ effort to prevent harvesting of the email addresses.
> > Most of them do something as simple as changing email addresses
> > found to (greg "at" turnstep.com) or something similar.
> 
> Ahhh, the signs of newbieness in spring.  ;-)
> 
> Dude, things that can be obfuscated can also be un-obfuscated.  Again,
> there is NOTHING (short of elimination) that you can do to prevent an
> email address, on a public archive, from being harvested.

Clearly what you say is true, but is it really relevant.  The issue
isn't whether it _can_ he unobfuscated and harvested, but whether it
_will_ be.  Just like it isn't whether a piece of spam can be
filtered, but whether it will be that matters.

My understanding is that email addresses are so easy to harvest right
now, that few harvesters bother trying to unobfuscate the email
addresses.  I suspect that even something as stupid as replacing all
'@'  symbols with ' AT ' in the archives would significantly reduce my
spam.  Doing funky stuff with hex codes might work even better.   
Spammers know that using strange spellings and characters can fool
many filters.  Similarly, I bet the same tricks would fool many
spammers.

--Michael