List stats redone

[Jacques B.]

> I fail to see that having the e-mail address on the list is a problem
> since it appears on everyones posting (except Tim's). Why would someone
> post to the list if they did not want to enable people to communicate
> with them.
<snip>
> Aaron Konstam telephone: (210) 656-0355 e-mail: akonstam at sbcglobal.net

First kudos to Thomas for brushing up his scripting skills.  I can
appreciate the desire to do that.  Just had a chance to reply to a
scripting question on the list earlier this morning so had to dust off
my own skills to answer it.  I don't think anyone faults him for
accepting his own challenge.

But I agree that it does conveniently organize all the email addresses
for bots to harvest.  And that is the key.  Bots will harvest it, not
a human.  So it matters not how small his list may be, it's still a
list that will get crawled when the bots hit it.  True a spammer could
do what Thomas did just as well as he did.  I'm sure some have
perfected scripts to harvest email addresses from lists and probably
have them target the lists regularly.  But as someone else pointed
out, why hand it to them on a silver plater?

Perhaps use a sed command to substitute the @ symbol with something
else not associated to an email address, or may just drop the domain
(i.e. .com, .net) using any number of ways to do it (awk, cut, sed,
pattern substitution).  Or do both so that instead of seeing
fedora-list at redhat.com you'd see fedora-list<is at>redhat (I suspect
some of the more clever bots are catching the <at> trick hence why use
something a bit different plus drop TLDomain extension).

Jacques B.