[CUBE] Offering email addresses to spammers as a policy

[Laurie A Duncan]

The list has been archived since it's inception in July 2000. However, only
the last 5 months worth is currently online, here
<http://lists.themacintoshguy.com/Lists/Cube/List.html>

I have no idea why there are only 5 month's worth of archives, as I have
nothing to do with the administration of this list. I recall there being
some server issues last fall though, so it's probably related to that. The
previous archives were probably lost at that time. But they were definitely
there before, and I used them regularly.

Everyone's email address appears in every archived messaged, as you can see
for yourself, although they are not "clickable" addresses unless you have
your address in your signature or it's quoted elsewhere by someone else. No
one else has reported their address being harvested for spam, so I'd suggest
the spam at apple.com you are seeing is coming from elsewhere - including your
own website, which has your email address all over it, and it's not encoded
in the text - only in the code, which is rather useless. The email address
listed in plain text on your own website, but encoded in the html code, is
the equivalent (lack of) protection the list archives offer - the address is
still recognizable as an address, and will be used as such by spam at apple.com
bots and harvesters. If you want to protect your own site from being
harvested for addresses in the future, your link text should NOT be
name at domain.com - but instead be "contact me here" or whatever you'd like to
display there.

Hope this clears things up for you.

Laurie
-- 
AOL IM/iChat: cubeownernyc
http://www.cubeowner.com
Home of The Mac Cube FAQ!


On 4/21/03 4:22 PM, gnarlodious at cybermesa.com added a note to the human
symphony, when this was said:

> Seems like this "archiving" didn't start until late last year. Any real
> database-driven archive would be inaccessible to spambots, but this Cube
> archive is plain public HTML pages.