Major problems with privacy and mailman lists and harvesters
Hello!
I'm quite concerned about what I'm seeing in mailman installations, and the amount of spam I've been getting because I participate in mailman based lists!
I'm not talking about halting spam that gets submitted to the list for mailing. I'm not talking about spambots automatically joining the lists and submitting spam.
What I'm concerned about is the fact that email harvesters are being given so much information.
I've noticed in the mailman-users archives, that if I view info by thread (using the mailman archives as an example,) which site is 2.1.10 based, that all email addresses are present, but with a simple obfuscation. (the "@" has been changed to " at ".) I can't help but to think that this simple obfuscation is a joke. Any harvester written in the past number of years would be smart enough to capture such accurately.
When viewing the developer's archives, I note that when a message is displayed singly, it is common to see [EMAIL PROTECTED]. This is much nicer, but I notice that in both archives, a button is provided at the bottom of the letter, that submits a form, and gets back both a "Found" page, with a mailto: url, and a redirect to a mailto... so, an anonymous user can easily get/harvest email addresses by simply analyzing the html form.
The gzip'd archives by month for both lists both show all email addresses, with the " at " obfuscation.
It seems inconsistent, funny even, that display by thread will show individual messages with [EMAIL REMOVED], but the gzip'd archives of the same message reveal, really, everything.
And worse... If I really wanted to collect up-to-date juicy email addresses, I'd simply subscribe to all the mailman lists I possibly could, and route all the incoming messages to harvesters. In **This** case, the harvest is bountiful, as most messages arrive totally unfiltered, from headers galore bearing bounteous harvests of email addresses (for example, the From header), to the user sigs at the ends, with reply quotation headers mentioning the source addresses in between.
Within MINUTES of my first posting on asterisk-users, I was getting spam on an email address that was brand-new. Since then, the spam volume on that email addr just keeps growing.
I keep wondering, which way did they get my email addr? But, it doesn't matter. I can't help to think that 'targeted' spam mailers both spider the archives and subscribe to the lists.The bigger the list's subscription, hotter an item it is.
So, please, can we apply the [EMAIL PROTECTED] tech to the archives, and the outgoing messages, and drop this silly notion that the " at " obfuscation is useful? Really, it's totally transparent. NO OBFUSCATION is safe in mailman. There's simply too much Can we drop the buttons from the archives whose HTML says:
<FORM METHOD="POST" ACTION="/cgi-bin/Nomailto.pl"> <INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN" NAME="user" VALUE="barb"> <INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN" NAME="host" VALUE="nleaudiox.com"> <INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN" NAME="subject" VALUE="Re: [Mailman-Developers] Important Mailman 2.1.9 to 2.1.10 upgrade note."> <INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN" NAME="msgid" VALUE="480E15F1.50200@nleaudio.com"> Reply via email to<br> <INPUT TYPE="SUBMIT" VALUE=" Bob [EMAIL PROTECTED] "> </FORM>
from which spam harvesters can almost instantly be updated to harvest "barb@nleaudiox.com" (modified from the orig to save the innocent author from a deluge of spam, at least on **my** account), without even submitting the form!
We need to rethink how we can adequately keep emails out of spammers hands. And, yes, it's kinda unhandy not read a message and not be able to fire an email off to the author directly. But to make it easy for list subscribers, is to make it easy for spammers, who probably have already joined the list, and are delighted to get email addresses, any which way they can.
Most discussion on mailing lists do not require any address other than the the mailing list itself. To take a discussion "offline", I propose a few ideas:
- the mailing list allows the users to specify a phone-number, an irc channel and identity that they can be reached by, or some other method to contact the author, that is NOT an email address. This info is kept private, and the button at the bottom of the archived letters could give you this info. The person wanting to privately discuss the letter could then call the user or contact them via irc/jabber/whatever, and either discuss the matter there and then, or the author could voluntarily give the other party his email address at that time. Or file a list message, and ask the author to contact him, and give out a phone number, whatever.
I thought about integrating spamgourmet throw-away email addresses, but really, that wouldn't help. Spammers could simply request, get the throw-away, spam it, and toss it. The user himself is the only one who can usefully hand out throw-away addresses.
If you think mailman doesn't have to worry about this sort of thing, keep in mind that mailman has swiftly become probably the top mailing list software on the web. That spammers would not be interested in mining mailing lists for their tens of thousands of valid addresses is foolhardy thinking. That thinking the options that mailman provides now is adequate to keep spammers from harvesting email addrs, is just plain wrong. That datamining and de-obfuscation are NOT being done specifically for mailman lists is wishful thinking.
Mailman needs to pay attention to the fact that spammers would **love** to use their mailing list installations to ship spam for them, AND ALSO that spammers will want to harvest email addresses from the web interface AND the mailings themselves.
We need to lock down mailman, or at least make it an option! Simply put, in messages sent to users, the only email that should be found anywhere in a recieved message, is the recipient's. In the archived messages, absolutely no email addresses at all. Not even obfuscated. If we follow this pattern, the spammers will not be able to use mailman lists for any useful purpose. They'll have to hack the web sites to get the lists.
murf
-- Steve Murphy Software Developer Digium
Hi Steve. Thank you for your email, it is well researched and conveys your point of view.
Your points on inconsistency in protecting email addresses in the archives are interesting. Also, I am no lover of spammers.
That said, can you break down your suggestions to those relevant to the inherent FUBAR state of SMTP, mailing list administration choices and policies, and mailman? I don't see how you can prevent a person or bot from subscribing to an open mailing list and harvesting it.
Some locking down is not possible, some not wanted, and some not necessary. I find, as I mentioned, the archives point for example very interesting, if anyone was willing to spend the time on making it happen.
Gadi.On Fri, 23 May 2008, Steve Murphy wrote:
Hello!
I'm quite concerned about what I'm seeing in mailman installations, and the amount of spam I've been getting because I participate in mailman based lists!
I'm not talking about halting spam that gets submitted to the list for mailing. I'm not talking about spambots automatically joining the lists and submitting spam.
What I'm concerned about is the fact that email harvesters are being given so much information.
I've noticed in the mailman-users archives, that if I view info by thread (using the mailman archives as an example,) which site is 2.1.10 based, that all email addresses are present, but with a simple obfuscation. (the "@" has been changed to " at ".) I can't help but to think that this simple obfuscation is a joke. Any harvester written in the past number of years would be smart enough to capture such accurately.
When viewing the developer's archives, I note that when a message is displayed singly, it is common to see [EMAIL PROTECTED]. This is much nicer, but I notice that in both archives, a button is provided at the bottom of the letter, that submits a form, and gets back both a "Found" page, with a mailto: url, and a redirect to a mailto... so, an anonymous user can easily get/harvest email addresses by simply analyzing the html form.
The gzip'd archives by month for both lists both show all email addresses, with the " at " obfuscation.
It seems inconsistent, funny even, that display by thread will show individual messages with [EMAIL REMOVED], but the gzip'd archives of the same message reveal, really, everything.
And worse... If I really wanted to collect up-to-date juicy email addresses, I'd simply subscribe to all the mailman lists I possibly could, and route all the incoming messages to harvesters. In **This** case, the harvest is bountiful, as most messages arrive totally unfiltered, from headers galore bearing bounteous harvests of email addresses (for example, the From header), to the user sigs at the ends, with reply quotation headers mentioning the source addresses in between.
Within MINUTES of my first posting on asterisk-users, I was getting spam on an email address that was brand-new. Since then, the spam volume on that email addr just keeps growing.
I keep wondering, which way did they get my email addr? But, it doesn't matter. I can't help to think that 'targeted' spam mailers both spider the archives and subscribe to the lists.The bigger the list's subscription, hotter an item it is.
So, please, can we apply the [EMAIL PROTECTED] tech to the archives, and the outgoing messages, and drop this silly notion that the " at " obfuscation is useful? Really, it's totally transparent. NO OBFUSCATION is safe in mailman. There's simply too much Can we drop the buttons from the archives whose HTML says:
<FORM METHOD="POST" ACTION="/cgi-bin/Nomailto.pl"> <INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN" NAME="user" VALUE="barb"> <INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN" NAME="host" VALUE="nleaudiox.com"> <INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN" NAME="subject" VALUE="Re: [Mailman-Developers] Important Mailman 2.1.9 to 2.1.10 upgrade note."> <INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN" NAME="msgid" VALUE="480E15F1.50200@nleaudio.com"> Reply via email to<br> <INPUT TYPE="SUBMIT" VALUE=" Bob [EMAIL PROTECTED] "> </FORM>
from which spam harvesters can almost instantly be updated to harvest "barb@nleaudiox.com" (modified from the orig to save the innocent author from a deluge of spam, at least on **my** account), without even submitting the form!
We need to rethink how we can adequately keep emails out of spammers hands. And, yes, it's kinda unhandy not read a message and not be able to fire an email off to the author directly. But to make it easy for list subscribers, is to make it easy for spammers, who probably have already joined the list, and are delighted to get email addresses, any which way they can.
Most discussion on mailing lists do not require any address other than the the mailing list itself. To take a discussion "offline", I propose a few ideas:
- the mailing list allows the users to specify a phone-number, an irc channel and identity that they can be reached by, or some other method to contact the author, that is NOT an email address. This info is kept private, and the button at the bottom of the archived letters could give you this info. The person wanting to privately discuss the letter could then call the user or contact them via irc/jabber/whatever, and either discuss the matter there and then, or the author could voluntarily give the other party his email address at that time. Or file a list message, and ask the author to contact him, and give out a phone number, whatever.
I thought about integrating spamgourmet throw-away email addresses, but really, that wouldn't help. Spammers could simply request, get the throw-away, spam it, and toss it. The user himself is the only one who can usefully hand out throw-away addresses.
If you think mailman doesn't have to worry about this sort of thing, keep in mind that mailman has swiftly become probably the top mailing list software on the web. That spammers would not be interested in mining mailing lists for their tens of thousands of valid addresses is foolhardy thinking. That thinking the options that mailman provides now is adequate to keep spammers from harvesting email addrs, is just plain wrong. That datamining and de-obfuscation are NOT being done specifically for mailman lists is wishful thinking.
Mailman needs to pay attention to the fact that spammers would **love** to use their mailing list installations to ship spam for them, AND ALSO that spammers will want to harvest email addresses from the web interface AND the mailings themselves.
We need to lock down mailman, or at least make it an option! Simply put, in messages sent to users, the only email that should be found anywhere in a recieved message, is the recipient's. In the archived messages, absolutely no email addresses at all. Not even obfuscated. If we follow this pattern, the spammers will not be able to use mailman lists for any useful purpose. They'll have to hack the web sites to get the lists.
murf
-- Steve Murphy Software Developer Digium
Steve Murphy wrote:
I've noticed in the mailman-users archives, that if I view info by thread (using the mailman archives as an example,) which site is 2.1.10 based, that all email addresses are present, but with a simple obfuscation. (the "@" has been changed to " at ".) I can't help but to think that this simple obfuscation is a joke. Any harvester written in the past number of years would be smart enough to capture such accurately.
This is a well-known weakness. Please feel free to upload a suggested patch to <http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=300103&group_id=103&func=browse>, or at least file a Request For Enhancement at <http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=350103&group_id=103&func=browse>.
When viewing the developer's archives, I note that when a message is displayed singly, it is common to see [EMAIL PROTECTED].
That's the external searchable archives provided by mail-archive.com, which is actually available for both mailman-users and mailman-developers.
The gzip'd archives by month for both lists both show all email addresses, with the " at " obfuscation.
Yup. That's part of the standard internal pipermail archiving process.
Within MINUTES of my first posting on asterisk-users, I was getting spam on an email address that was brand-new. Since then, the spam volume on that email addr just keeps growing.
We've known that this weakness was a potential issue for years. However, I don't recall our ever hearing a specific case where this weakness was actually being exploited.
If you look at those "patches" and "RFE" pages, you'll note that there are a large number of things that people want from Mailman (200-300 things or more per category), and since this is a 100% volunteer-supported project, our developers have limited time and resources to be able to devote to fixing each and every little thing that people have asked for.
We need to rethink how we can adequately keep emails out of spammers hands.
Even with better obfuscation, the spammers will always be able to silently subscribe to the lists and harvest addresses that way. There's no way to stop them from doing that.
And, yes, it's kinda unhandy not read a message and not be able to fire an email off to the author directly. But to make it easy for list subscribers, is to make it easy for spammers, who probably have already joined the list, and are delighted to get email addresses, any which way they can.
We can't obscure messages that we send out. Otherwise, they wouldn't get delivered. You do have to have some basic understanding of how Internet e-mail works before you can talk intelligently about what could or should be done.
We need to lock down mailman, or at least make it an option! Simply put, in messages sent to users, the only email that should be found anywhere in a recieved message, is the recipient's.
If a list admin chooses, they can always enable anonymization. But there's a reason why no one wants to do this. Go talk to the people running anonymized lists to understand that problem more fully.
On a more general note, the more you break Internet e-mail in order to try to stop the spammers, the more the bastards win.
You're continuing to make the critical mistake that everyone else does, which is that you're trying to solve an inherently non-technical problem with technical means. And that is a recipe for guaranteed disaster.
Spam is just another form of con job. And if the "oldest profession" is prostitute, then the second oldest profession has to be "con artist". Con jobs have been going on for thousands of years, and there's no evidence that they will ever stop being perpetrated, at least not so long as our species continues to have at least one member still alive.
So, you're not *EVER* going to get rid of spam. Give that fight up right now. The best you can do is to try to cut it down to a dull roar, and make sure that you're not one of the lower-hanging fruit.
Then always keep in the back of your mind that a sufficiently determined attacker can get through the deepest and most powerful defenses -- if they can assassinate presidents and other government leaders, then they can certainly get through any defenses that people like you and me can afford to create.
-- Brad Knowles <brad@python.org> Member of the Python.org Postmaster Team & Co-Moderator of the mailman-users and mailman-developers mailing lists
On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 1:03 PM, Steve Murphy <murf@digium.com> wrote:
Within MINUTES of my first posting on asterisk-users, I was getting spam on an email address that was brand-new.
How do you know that it was your archived post that the spammers picked up on? It is also possible that the harvester is an address subscribed to asterisk-users.
IMHO, obfuscating the archives achieves little effect other than a false sense of hope. The fact is spammers don't want stale archived email addresses, they want fresh active (i.e. poster's) addresses.
Welcome to 2008, ;-)
-Jim P.
Steve Murphy wrote:
I'm quite concerned about what I'm seeing in mailman installations, and the amount of spam I've been getting >because I participate in mailman based lists!
What I'm concerned about is the fact that email harvesters are being given so much information.
I've noticed in the mailman-users archives, that if I view info by thread (using the mailman archives as an >example,) which site is 2.1.10 based, that all email addresses are present, but with a simple obfuscation. (the "@" has been changed to " at ".) I can't help but to think that this simple obfuscation is a joke. Any >harvester written in the past number of years would be smart enough to capture such accurately.
When we were looking for a list software package, we came up against this problem. I think the issue here is that the archives are open to anyone (aka public archives), and there is no real way of allowing people to contact anyone off list if the email addresses are protected. That said, there are a number of external archiving solutions around that will do this already, such as MHonArc http://www.mhonarc.org/.
When viewing the developer's archives, I note that when a message is displayed singly, it is common to see >[EMAIL PROTECTED]. This is much nicer, but I notice that in both archives, a button is provided at the bottom >of the letter, that submits a form, and gets back both a "Found" page, with a mailto: url, and a redirect to a >mailto... so, an anonymous user can easily get/harvest email addresses by simply analyzing the html form.
The email form is done by mail-archive.com, and they are running several honeypots to monitor spam coming in via this method. The FAQ which explains this is at http://www.mail-archive.com/faq.html.
[...]
It seems inconsistent, funny even, that display by thread will show individual messages with [EMAIL REMOVED], >but the gzip'd archives of the same message reveal, really, everything.
Are you sure you are viewing the same archives?
And worse... If I really wanted to collect up-to-date juicy email addresses, I'd simply subscribe to all the >mailman lists I possibly could, and route all the incoming messages to harvesters. In **This** case, the >harvest is bountiful, as most messages arrive totally unfiltered, from headers galore bearing bounteous >harvests of email addresses (for example, the From header), to the user sigs at the ends, with reply quotation >headers mentioning the source addresses in between.
This is a problem with email not Mailman. Do you see Freelists, YahooGroups or Google Groups doing similar?
Within MINUTES of my first posting on asterisk-users, I was getting spam on an email address that was brand->new. Since then, the spam volume on that email addr just keeps growing.
That is interesting as I have subscribed to several lists using a list account at work which are on Mailman - namely RedHat and LUG user groups, and I haven't had spam to that address in ages. Contrast this with my main work address, which I use to sign up for email newsletters (when evaluating products), use as sales contacts, fill in web forms etc, where I get around 40-50 spams a day.
I keep wondering, which way did they get my email addr? But, it doesn't matter. I can't help to think that 'targeted' spam mailers both spider the archives and subscribe to the lists.The bigger the list's subscription, hotter an >item it is.
Maybe you should post this to one of the mail-archive lists, to see if the people controlling the honeypots are finding similar.
So, please, can we apply the [EMAIL PROTECTED] tech to the archives, and the outgoing messages, and drop this >silly notion that the " at " obfuscation is useful? Really, it's totally transparent.
Possibly agreeing with you viz the archiving via the web, but I for one would never use such a feature as email protection on any of my lists for email subscribers.
Andrew.
Steve Murphy wrote at 10:03 AM 5/23/2008:
I've noticed in the mailman-users archives, that if I view info by thread (using the mailman archives as an example,) which site is 2.1.10 based, that all email addresses are present, but with a simple obfuscation. (the "@" has been changed to " at ".) I can't help but to think that this simple obfuscation is a joke. Any harvester written in the past number of years would be smart enough to capture such accurately.
I think the Topica listserver had a great way to deal with email addresses in archives. You could see a semblance of the email address, but no way could you deduce the real address. If you are logged into the site, each is still obscured, but is a live link that opens up an email-like dialog box -- with the real address still obscured. But it does send an email to the real address for the obscured address.
Pretty good way of dealing with the problem, but I have no idea if something like this could be coded into Mailman archives.
Michael Welch, volunteer Redwood Alliance PO Box 293 Arcata, CA 95518 707-822-7884 mwelch@redwoodalliance.org www.redwoodalliance.org
Michael Welch wrote:
[Regarding obscuring email addresses in archives]
I think the Topica listserver had a great way to deal with email addresses in archives. You could see a >semblance of the email address, but no way could you deduce the real address. If you are logged into the site, >each is still obscured, but is a live link that opens up an email-like dialog box -- with the real address >still obscured. But it does send an email to the real address for the obscured address.
The problem I can see with that is it may not work well on a public archive, and if we wanted a private archive, we would need to protect the users from spammers signing into the system, and sending a whole bunch of emails, possibly through the server running the archives!
Andrew.
Michael Welch wrote:
Steve Murphy wrote at 10:03 AM 5/23/2008:
I've noticed in the mailman-users archives, that if I view info by thread (using the mailman archives as an example,) which site is 2.1.10 based, that all email addresses are present, but with a simple obfuscation. (the "@" has been changed to " at ".) I can't help but to think that this simple obfuscation is a joke. Any harvester written in the past number of years would be smart enough to capture such accurately.
I think the Topica listserver had a great way to deal with email addresses in archives. You could see a semblance of the email address, but no way could you deduce the real address. If you are logged into the site, each is still obscured, but is a live link that opens up an email-like dialog box -- with the real address still obscured. But it does send an email to the real address for the obscured address.
Pretty good way of dealing with the problem, but I have no idea if something like this could be coded into Mailman archives. ---------------- End original message. ---------------------
Doing so is definitely possible, but it would require that the archive pages be served via a CGI program and that you have some sort of database of those e-mail addresses that said CGI process would access.
If I am not mistaken, I believe that there is currently a wrapper script that handles access control to private archives but which gets bypassed if the archive is public. The current architecture under pipermail is that the actual archive pages themselves are just static HTML files and the wrapper script only has the function of setting and checking an access token in a cookie to access them if the archive is private.
Dragon
Venimus, Saltavimus, Bibimus (et naribus canium capti sumus)
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Dragon wrote: | | If I am not mistaken, I believe that there is currently a wrapper | script that handles access control to private archives but which gets | bypassed if the archive is public. The current architecture under | pipermail is that the actual archive pages themselves are just static | HTML files and the wrapper script only has the function of setting | and checking an access token in a cookie to access them if the | archive is private.
See <http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=850805&group_id=103&atid=300103> for one approach to this.
Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
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| I think the Topica listserver had a great way to deal with email | addresses in archives. You could see a semblance of the email address, | but no way could you deduce the real address. If you are logged into | the site, each is still obscured, but is a live link that opens up an | email-like dialog box -- with the real address still obscured. But it | does send an email to the real address for the obscured address.
Try clicking the 'forward' button when viewing a message in a Topica archive. It reveals all.
Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
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Mark Sapiro wrote at 08:58 PM 6/2/2008:
| I think the Topica listserver had a great way to deal with email | addresses in archives. You could see a semblance of the email address, | but no way could you deduce the real address. If you are logged into | the site, each is still obscured, but is a live link that opens up an | email-like dialog box -- with the real address still obscured. But it | does send an email to the real address for the obscured address.
Try clicking the 'forward' button when viewing a message in a Topica archive. It reveals all.
Right, there's lots broken at Topica. But I sure do like the intent of their obscuration technique.
Michael Welch, volunteer Redwood Alliance PO Box 293 Arcata, CA 95518 707-822-7884 mwelch@redwoodalliance.org www.redwoodalliance.org
When creating archives for one of the lists I run (until recently with another listserv software) I wrote a relatively simple find/replace grep which replaces the domain names so that email addresses become billc@... In this case, the list itself is by invitation only but the archives are open to all, so the list members can figure out who the posters are easily enough and some non listmembers may as well, but the spammers won't have a clue.
Having just moved over to Mailman recently I have yet to implement that fix on my lists but I hope to do so in the fairly near future.
Another trick that I've used with our web databases is to assign an ID to a user and create a spam-resistant mail form which doesn't display the email address in the source code, but instead retrieves it via the ID behind the scenes when the email is sent. It's probably similar to the Topica method that Michael Welch posted about, and it works fairly well for us (though in the last couple of weeks someone found their way around it. I still need to figure out the hole and plug it up).
The big problem I see with implementing most of the anti-spam tricks I employ as a relatively small web developer on as large a scale as incorporating them into Mailman is that with enough motivation and a little research a spammer could still script around them and exploit Mailman lists, either by harvesting or direct sending. They're typically not overly motivated to do so for our little market, but with all the Mailman lists out there it would certainly be a target.
At 11:03 AM -0600 5/23/08, Steve Murphy wrote:
Content-Type: multipart/signed; micalg=sha1; protocol="application/x-pkcs7-signature"; boundary="=-xE9PbKG5Tri4f0crMNni"
Hello!
I'm quite concerned about what I'm seeing in mailman installations, and the amount of spam I've been getting because I participate in mailman based lists!
I'm not talking about halting spam that gets submitted to the list for mailing. I'm not talking about spambots automatically joining the lists and submitting spam.
What I'm concerned about is the fact that email harvesters are being given so much information.
I've noticed in the mailman-users archives, that if I view info by thread (using the mailman archives as an example,) which site is 2.1.10 based, that all email addresses are present, but with a simple obfuscation. (the "@" has been changed to " at ".) I can't help but to think that this simple obfuscation is a joke. Any harvester written in the past number of years would be smart enough to capture such accurately.
When viewing the developer's archives, I note that when a message is displayed singly, it is common to see [EMAIL PROTECTED]. This is much nicer, but I notice that in both archives, a button is provided at the bottom of the letter, that submits a form, and gets back both a "Found" page, with a mailto: url, and a redirect to a mailto... so, an anonymous user can easily get/harvest email addresses by simply analyzing the html form.
The gzip'd archives by month for both lists both show all email addresses, with the " at " obfuscation.
It seems inconsistent, funny even, that display by thread will show individual messages with [EMAIL REMOVED], but the gzip'd archives of the same message reveal, really, everything.
And worse... If I really wanted to collect up-to-date juicy email addresses, I'd simply subscribe to all the mailman lists I possibly could, and route all the incoming messages to harvesters. In **This** case, the harvest is bountiful, as most messages arrive totally unfiltered, from headers galore bearing bounteous harvests of email addresses (for example, the From header), to the user sigs at the ends, with reply quotation headers mentioning the source addresses in between.
Within MINUTES of my first posting on asterisk-users, I was getting spam on an email address that was brand-new. Since then, the spam volume on that email addr just keeps growing.
I keep wondering, which way did they get my email addr? But, it doesn't matter. I can't help to think that 'targeted' spam mailers both spider the archives and subscribe to the lists.The bigger the list's subscription, hotter an item it is.
So, please, can we apply the [EMAIL PROTECTED] tech to the archives, and the outgoing messages, and drop this silly notion that the " at " obfuscation is useful? Really, it's totally transparent. NO OBFUSCATION is safe in mailman. There's simply too much Can we drop the buttons from the archives whose HTML says:
<FORM METHOD="POST" ACTION="/cgi-bin/Nomailto.pl"> <INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN" NAME="user" VALUE="barb"> <INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN" NAME="host" VALUE="nleaudiox.com"> <INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN" NAME="subject" VALUE="Re: [Mailman-Developers] Important Mailman 2.1.9 to 2.1.10 upgrade note."> <INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN" NAME="msgid" VALUE="480E15F1.50200@nleaudio.com"> Reply via email to<br> <INPUT TYPE="SUBMIT" VALUE=" Bob [EMAIL PROTECTED] "> </FORM>
from which spam harvesters can almost instantly be updated to harvest "barb@nleaudiox.com" (modified from the orig to save the innocent author from a deluge of spam, at least on **my** account), without even submitting the form!
We need to rethink how we can adequately keep emails out of spammers hands. And, yes, it's kinda unhandy not read a message and not be able to fire an email off to the author directly. But to make it easy for list subscribers, is to make it easy for spammers, who probably have already joined the list, and are delighted to get email addresses, any which way they can.
Most discussion on mailing lists do not require any address other than the the mailing list itself. To take a discussion "offline", I propose a few ideas:
- the mailing list allows the users to specify a phone-number, an irc channel and identity that they can be reached by, or some other method to contact the author, that is NOT an email address. This info is kept private, and the button at the bottom of the archived letters could give you this info. The person wanting to privately discuss the letter could then call the user or contact them via irc/jabber/whatever, and either discuss the matter there and then, or the author could voluntarily give the other party his email address at that time. Or file a list message, and ask the author to contact him, and give out a phone number, whatever.
I thought about integrating spamgourmet throw-away email addresses, but really, that wouldn't help. Spammers could simply request, get the throw-away, spam it, and toss it. The user himself is the only one who can usefully hand out throw-away addresses.
If you think mailman doesn't have to worry about this sort of thing, keep in mind that mailman has swiftly become probably the top mailing list software on the web. That spammers would not be interested in mining mailing lists for their tens of thousands of valid addresses is foolhardy thinking. That thinking the options that mailman provides now is adequate to keep spammers from harvesting email addrs, is just plain wrong. That datamining and de-obfuscation are NOT being done specifically for mailman lists is wishful thinking.
Mailman needs to pay attention to the fact that spammers would **love** to use their mailing list installations to ship spam for them, AND ALSO that spammers will want to harvest email addresses from the web interface AND the mailings themselves.
We need to lock down mailman, or at least make it an option! Simply put, in messages sent to users, the only email that should be found anywhere in a recieved message, is the recipient's. In the archived messages, absolutely no email addresses at all. Not even obfuscated. If we follow this pattern, the spammers will not be able to use mailman lists for any useful purpose. They'll have to hack the web sites to get the lists.
murf
-- Steve Murphy Software Developer Digium
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participants (10)
-
Andrew Hodgson -
Bill Christensen -
Brad Knowles -
Dragon -
Gadi Evron -
Jim Popovitch -
Mark Sapiro -
Michael Welch -
Stephen J. Turnbull -
Steve Murphy