X-Message-Number: 18862
Date: Mon, 25 Mar 2002 14:26:35 -0500
From: Wesley Eddy <>
Subject: Re: CryoNet: 18857
References: <>

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On Mon, Mar 25, 2002 at 05:03:21PM -0000, Phillip Labry wrote:
> 
> I have been getting a lot of spam lately and I decided to do a search for my
> email address. The cryonet archive is wide open for the web spiders to cull
> our email addresses. I think it would be wise to lock the archive up and
> allow access for subscribers only.
>

I have to disagree big-time with you on that issue.  I doubt most people
who are just casually looking for information about cryonics or some related
issue discussed on these lists would be willing to join the mailing list
simply to access the archives, so by imposing such a policy you exclude them
and thus risk losing not only potential cryopatients but also members of the
populace who aren't signed-up, but might be sympathetic to the motivations
of those who are.

This kind of problem has hit mailing lists and newsgroups before, and generally
it seems that the best solution is not to lock them up for members only (people
with multiple addresses cause a headache), but to leave them open and place the
onus on posters to protect themselves from the spam.  Personally, I've never
had a problem with that policy, as it's rather easy to spot spam and delete
it without wasting time reading it, and there are several software packages
available to do just that.

If you want to hide the email account you check mail at from the spiders, it's
not particularly difficult to sign up for a free hotmail account or one at any
of the other zillion places that provide free web-based email, and post from

there with a sentence that says "reply to me via me at myisp dot com rather than
the from address of this message."  It seems most of the spider software isn't
intelligent enough to turn that into , but certainly any human
reader is, thus you get all the legitimate replies and none of the spam.  There
are more creative ways to hide your address, like say "m e @ m y i s p . com",
in a way that people will understand but will confound most address mining
software, but the point is that the archives need to remain open ...

-Wes

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