[plug] Addresses still in archives.

[Craig Ringer]

On Mon, 2004-10-18 at 13:43, Cameron Patrick wrote:

> Cameron.  (Not a fan of address mungling, but who enabled it anyway on
> the lurker archives at others' requests.)

I'm increasingly coming to believe it's a lost cause. In addition to
mailing lists that don't mangle addresses, there are a _great_ many
Windows users out there with address-harvesting spyware. Correspond with
a user of an infected machine - even via a mailing list - and you're
toast.

Google is currently finding ~5050 hits on a search for my email address,
and that's just the public stuff on the web.

That said, I'm finding a strict MTA, plus fairly forgiving SpamAssassin
checking, works extremely well. Simple things help a lot. For example,
since reconfiguring Postfix on Friday to reject mail from servers that
HELO as "localhost" my spam volumes have fallen dramatically - it's
quite amusing watching the logs.

Speaking of watching the logs, I've noticed a lot of servers scanning
for valid addresses using dictionary attacks. A _lot_. It would be very
interesting to detect these attacks (they're painfully obvious -
strictly alphabetical, no randomisation) and temporarily block the
hosts.

--
Craig Ringer