From: adam beecher (adam at domain iewebs.com)
Date: Mon 15 May 2000 - 14:25:17 IST
> I have never heard of an address-harvester which looks through email
> archives on the Net for spam lists, and I strongly doubt that the ILUG
> archives are being searched like this.
>
Well, I have no proof that the spam is originating from the ILUG archives, I'm
just suggesting it as a possible source, and a hole that's open to abuse. Your
thoughts on addy-harversters though - and I mean no offense by this - are a bit
misguided. Spammers don't play by the rules, and the big operators - the
important ones, who create those bloody CD's to sell to the morons - use custom
coded spiders to achieve their sordid ends. They're released whenever and
wherever the spammer sees fit, and if a spammer finds the ILUG archives s/he
*will* release one there. And linux.ie seems to fare well on the search engines,
so it's only a matter of time, if it hasn't happened already.
> I'm unwilling to modify the pipermail archiver from its distributed state,
> as I generally don't have time to maintain extra patches for software
> on my servers. Feel free to download the pipermail sources (comes
> with the mailman package - see http://www.list.org/) and submit your
> own patch to the maintainer. If address obfuscation is an option in the
> standard distribution of pipermail, I'd consider enabling it.
>
By now I've gathered that Pipermail is written in Python, and Python is a wee
bit down on my TODO. Also, from a quick search on Google, it seems that
development of Pipermail has stopped - it's been incorporated completely into
mailman, and apparently the developers are looking into Mhonarc and other
alternatives.
It's unfortunate that something as - seemingly - simple as this couldn't be
incorporated into the pipermail archives, or a suitable replacement be found. At
the very least with the purpose of protecting the linux.ie users...
Ah well...
adam
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