On Tue, 14 Oct 2003, [ISO-8859-2] Jörg Müller-Tolk wrote:

> I am using a special mail account for my curl abo (curl_at_mueller-tolk.de)
> which I don't use anywhere else. I just got my first spam on this account.
> Has anyone experienced the same?

The spam plague hits us all. I personally get several thousand spams every
month and all the curl mailing lists are targeted with lots of spam mail every
day (the mailing list admins discard them since they come from unsubscribed
users).

On the curl web site I've tried to make an effort to prevent email addresses
from appearing with the classic email look, to give the spam harvesters a
tougher job. However, the curl mailing lists are all archived on and
accessible from several different places, and all of those don't take the same
precautions.

So, this leaves us these possibilities:

a) someone added your email by hand to a list
b) a spam harvest program decoded our "spammified" addresses used on the site
c) a failure to "spammify" the address somewhere on the curl site made it
   accessible
d) they found your email address on a web archive hosted by someone else

Whatever the actual reason is in this case, I don't see what effective means
we can take to prevent this from happening again without sacrifising something
we value or adding a lot of work on me.

Before we started to "spammify" addresses on the curl site, tests showed that
you would get spam VERY soon after your first post on a curl mailing list.
This proved our efforts at least saved some of us from some spam.

I personally filter all my incoming email using bogofilter, which does a very
good job at saving me from a vast majority of all spams. If you use a special
email address for the curl mailing lists, perhaps you could even take a step
further and simply throw away all mails sent to your address that don't come
from a curl mailing list.

-- 
 Daniel Stenberg -- curl: been grokking URLs since 1998
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