Real mail addresses in list postings and resulting **SPAM**

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Thu, 2009-09-24 at 11:52 +0200, Christoph Frieben wrote:
> Does anybody have a good idea how to avoid the appearance of real mail
> addresses in the body of postings to fedora-devel/test-list when
> people reply to an earlier message? Could additional technical
> measures be taken to remove or alter them such that they cannot be
> harvested by third parties?
> It seems that the problem is amplified by sites which mirror the
> original list without taking the same measure to obfuscate mail
> addresses, e.g. by filtering out the commercial at sign. Thus the
> problem is not one of how Fedora list archives are managed/displayed
> but rather one of preparing incoming messages before postingthem to
> the list subscribers.
> Any subscriber could help of course by removing/obfuscating real mail
> addresses in the message body before posting it to the list.

You might want to read
http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-developers@python.org/msg11500.html
from the Mailman list. It's a proposal to remove the obfuscation code
from Mailman on the grounds that any publicly visible address will
eventually be harvested. I actually think obfuscation does help even if
it's not foolproof, but the proposal is worth reading.

poc