Well, I’m mostly to blame for Peter’s sudden interest in spam. I sent
mail to Peter, asking if it were possible to reduce the public
(unauthenticated) exposure of the NTDEV/NTFSD lists. (I’m fairly
certain that my own address was harvested due to posting on NTDEV/NTFSD,
because I’ve been excruciatingly cautious with this address.)
Peter pointed out that the archives do obfuscate addresses (although
some spammers have caught on to this, and convert at back to @, etc.).
I’m happy to see this – I had assumed that the archives on ntdev.org
were current, and did not realize that 1) Peter is not responsible for
them, and 2) that they are not current; they end in December 2002.
My main concern is not the lists being used as a means to deliver spam
(easily prevented), but as a means to harvest email addresses.
I think the web search interface is not too vulnerable – spammers would
have to seed search URLs with random terms into their harvesters.
(Although – who knows? – they might already do this.) I think any
NNTP interface is far more vulnerable, because the spammers would only
need to create a single account, then have their harvester use NNTP,
which provides lots of standardized ways to enumerate messages, headers,
etc.
Personally, I vote:
- To turn off NNTP access
- To require that web searches be authenticated
I know this requires monkeying with the web site, which costs time. Yet
more productivity lost to spam. Sigh.
– arlie
-----Original Message-----
From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com
[mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of Thomas F. Divine
Sent: Monday, September 08, 2003 1:00 PM
To: Windows System Software Developers Interest List
Subject: [ntdev] Re: Possible NTDEV Policy Change? Close list to public?
Discontinue Web Interface for READ?
You said "Our goal for this proposal is to reduce spam to our members.
".
I did not understand which aspect of spam you are addressing.
Certainly do anything that helps.
Thomas
“Peter Viscarola” wrote in message news:xxxxx@ntdev…
>
>
> “Thomas F. Divine” wrote in message
news:xxxxx@ntdev…
> >
> >
> > The only way I know of to reduce list spam takes manual
> > intervention.
One
> > way is to have a mode where new members postings are initally
> > moderated.
> >
> …
> > message (This is becomming common).
> …
>
> I am not aware of ANY spam traversing this list or being sent out via
> our list server. None. Ever. If this is NOT the case, you should let
> me know IMMEDIATELY, supplying the smtp headers. I know that I’ve
> NEVER seen a
piece
> of spam go through our list server, and I don’t see any in the
> archives.
>
> It seems to me that moderating the postings would only stop people
> from posting spam to the list. Since there IS no spam posted to the
> list, at least as far as I know, I don’t think this would help.
>
> Please note that some spammers use Lyris for ourgoing mailings… You
should
> not conclude that because something comes from Lyris that it comes
> from
OSR.
>
> The problem we’re trying to address with closing access to the lists
> is people harvesting email addresses from the lists. Note the we
> don’t think this is a BIG problem (note that, because of they way they
> are organized, NTFSD.org and NTDEV.org are likely a far bigger problem
> than the lists themselves. Note that NTDEV.org and NTFSD.org are not
> run by OSR –
though
> we’ve offered numerous times to take them over (the current owner
> feels
that
> we should pay him for this privilged, which is not bloddy likely)).
>
> >
> > I not get about 300+ SPAM/virus emails a day, with only a small
> > handful
of
> > legitimate mesages. It is truly an overwhelming problem.
> >
>
> Oh, yeah! Of course! We’re finding that over 60% of the email to
> osr.com is SPAM, much of it of the most vile and disgusting sort.
>
> We need to try to do something to make it less easy for these
> people…
>
> Peter
>
>
>
>
—
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