Subject: Re: ID publication, Spam, & IETF Mailing lists

From: Cullen Jennings <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 1 Jul 2006 21:38:46 -0700

On Jun 27, 2006, at 3:08 AM, David Kessens wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 27, 2006 at 10:09:18AM +0200, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
>> James Kempf wrote:
>>> Well, one solution to the spam problem would be to publish email
>>> addresses in a form that isn't easily harvestable, like "jon baz  
>>> at foo
>>> dot com".
>>
>> Personal opinion: it just isn't worth the hassle. One way or another,
>> your address *will* be harvested, and obfuscation doesn't have a  
>> significant
>> effect.
>
> My personal experience is different: One of the additional job
> benefits that I received when joining the IESG was an order of
> magnitude more spam due to the fact that my mail address was listed
> on the IETF website

It would be very interesting to see some good experiments on this.  
I'm sure you got more spam when you became an AD (and no, I'm not  
talking about the iesg list :-) One possibility is that your address  
got harvested from the IETF web page. However, I think there many  
other possibilities. Odds are good your name is now in more address  
books that it used to be. Odds are good there are more mailing lists  
that white list anything from you. Odds are good that spam claiming  
to be from you has a higher chance of being read by a real human  
instead of just discarded. That means there is more SPAM that has  
your name in the from which will result in more spam sent to you. Is  
that what happened? I have no idea but the more I think about it the  
less obvious the answer is to me.

It seems likely there are some spam harvesting systems that are so  
lame that they don't have a perl rule that fixes dave at example dot  
com but I bet there are a lot that do surprisingly smart things. I'm  
sure the lists of emails that work get sold and merged. Think of what  
you would do if you were trying to generate email addresses. Think of  
what you can do with some machine queries to google.

As a bit of trivia... there was the rumor floating around that phone  
numbers were harvested out of internet drafts and that you should not  
put a phone number other than your companies main switchboard. I  
think this rumor is totally false and as my personal retaliation  
against this urban legend, I have been putting my cell phone number  
in many of my drafts for several years now and have not received a  
single phone call that was not a valid call that I wanted to receive.

Anyways, my personal opinion is let people put what they want in the  
email addresses, I will continue to put [email-masked] all the time  
wishing I knew how to get less spam :-)