[Mailman-Users] Harvesting of email addresses for spam from archives

[Paul]

It helps to disallow but the site is allowing.  So possible some engines
will bot the whole site:

http://www.mail-archive.com/robots.txt


On Mon, September 8, 2008 8:25 am, David Beaumont wrote:
> We have had a lot of spams sent directly to our list members (i.e. not
> sent
> via mailman).  All of them have subject headings taken from list emails
> already sent out genuinely via mailman.  Almost all have our specific list
> prefix (but interesting not every one).
>
> Has anyone else had this recently (started 3rd Sept approx and the
> spammers
> listed from address has 'kiev' in it)?
>
> I can only think of 2 ways this has happened
>
> 1) Our public archives have been harvested by a spammer.  This would
> account
> for the subject headings being used.  Email addresses are displayed in the
> archives as, literally, 'name at domain.com' which is not immediately
> harvestable but wouldn't take much code to convert ' at ' to '@'. How do
> we
> make this more secure? I notice this list's archives are not standard
> mailman format!
>
> 2) One of our members PCs has been attacked and the subjects and email
> addresses taken from there.  All our emails are delivered with the reply
> to
> address being the list but the originators email showing.  This would
> account for a small number of the spams not having our list prefix in the
> subject heading (they would not have the prefix if stored in the sent box
> of
> the person that created the genuine message).  However I would expect at
> least some members to report spam with entirely non list subjects from the
> same spammer.
>
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