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

[William Bagwell]

On Thursday 10 February 2005 12:43 pm, Michael Hirsch wrote:
>snips
> My understanding is that email addresses are so easy to harvest right
> now, that few harvesters bother trying to unobfuscate the email
> addresses.

They do on usenet! Know this for a fact, as one of my two usenet addresses 
is a reverse spam block ("nospam" as a valid part) and it routinely receives 
spam CC'd to the de-munged version.

No proof, but have read that spamers pay people to manually de-mung 
addresses in high traffic groups.

Currently the most effective way to hide a valid address is in the reply-to 
header. (Reply-to is not included in the more common types of overviews, or 
"headers" pulled.) Obviously this would be impractical on a mailing list.

Once harvested an address will receive spam forever. However, I have 
personally observed both a decline over time to an idle address, and a huge 
sudden spike when it starts getting fresh harvest spam.
-- 
William