Re: Offlist spam

Quoting Robert Freiberger ([email protected]):

> I've been an infrequent replier to this email group for a while and the
> last posting I was surprised how the spam messages came in. My only guess
> is that either someone on the list is forwarding the people who reply to a
> spam source, which then replies back directly to the user. Or maybe there's
> some forwarding service that is scraping email addresses as they are
> processed. Either way it's nearly impossible to say which account is the
> problem.

Yes, that's been my conclusion.

One of the regulars actually tried to lobby to have me conceal the
mailing list (which has been highly public for 21 years).  The regular
appeared to have mistakenly thought the spam was transmitted -through-
the mailing list -- which is not the case, but possibly other commenters
would make the same mistake of interpretation, which is why I mentioned it.

Also worth noting is that implementing that request would do nothing to
terminate the offlist annoyances, which underlines the larger point that
this annoyance can trivially be carried out against participants of any
public Internet mailing list, past, present, or future.  And, AFAIK,
that cannot be prevented without ability to police the entire Internet.

> Either way, it's a minor inconvenience as the quality value of this email
> list is very high compared to other groups I use.

And, you know, it's not dificult to create a ruleset for received mail
to make one's antispam software regard offlist mail received in apparent
response to on-list postings with greater suspicion.