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Volunteering for OSS == Sign Up for Spam?

Posted by Cliff on from the drawbacks-for-web-accessible-mailinglist-archives dept.

bckspc asks: "I've been getting pounded by spam lately, so did a Google search on my email address to see where it might appear on the Web. To my horror, it turned up several times in an archive of a Gnome listserv for a project I briefly participated in. While the email address is visibly obscured on the Web pages, it is quite intact in the HTML code. I emailed the list admin about obscuring or removing my email address, but was curtly dismissed. I'm a relative newbie and the experience soured me on participating in other OSS projects. How to Slashdot users deal with this? Must I set up disposable email accounts for every list?"

2 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. Short on solutions bar list admins clueing up by ffub · · Score: 5, Informative

    Try using simply foss@domain for lists, and them filter ad filter and filter it. I do agree this is very annoying, and although some listservs do respect this and change the email addresses on list servers, this can't be relied apon. I can't choose my participation based on which projects are going to give my email away.

    The only solution that will effectively work (until we fix the spam problem all round) is for list admins to be more careful about munging email addresses to some degree.

    The default setting for programs such as pipermail should be one where email addresses are not explicitly displayed.

    The best solution I've found to solve problems with email addresses online is Jodrell's mailto php script which renders the address obfuscated but displays it correctly in the browser using JavaScript.

    http://jodrell.net/projects/mailto

  2. use multiple disposable email addresses by lanroth · · Score: 5, Informative
    Years ago I setup a Freeserve account which allows me to receive email to anything@myaccountname.freeserve.co.uk

    Whenever I need to put my email address somewhere public (i.e. mailing lists and websites) I make up a new email address of the form mailinglistname@myaccountname.freeserve.co.uk or websitename@myaccountname.freeserve.co.uk e.g. the email address I gave slashdot is slashdot.org@myaccountname.freeserve.co.uk

    The good part: when I start getting spam to a particular address I just setup a filter that sends all mail to that address to /dev/null It also lets you know where your email address was harvested from. So when I get spam turning up on slashdot.org@myaccountname.freeserve.co.uk I know it was slashdot who sold my email address to the evil spammers ;-)

    If I want to receive mail from slashdot again I just change my email on slashdot to slashdot.org2@myaccountname.freeserve.co.uk

    Interestingly most of the spam I get comes in to the email address ebay.co.uk@myaccountname.freeserve.co.uk

    This has worked very well for me for several years.