Re: Anti-spam on usenet (Google Groups?)

From: DaveK (no.spam_at_my.mailbox.invalid)
Date: 05/30/03 

Date: Fri, 30 May 2003 15:52:09 +0100

"GregR" <spamalyzer@suespammers.org.NULL> wrote in message
news:3ED4D17C.DC1B46B7@suespammers.org.NULL...
> NEWBIE wrote:
>
> > I understand that google groups isn't the same as usenet. However it
> > covers pretty much the same info it seems to me.
>
> Correct. Goggle Groups is an archive of (most of) what's posted to
> Usenet. I say "most of" because they don't carry all the groups out there
> (most notably the binary groups), and some groups that don't get a lot of
> activity will come up as "no longer archived". That, and some people
> include the "X-No-Archive: Yes" header in their posts, which does exactly
> what it sounds like.

According to quite a lot of people, and I think I've heard that Google admit
this is true, the XNA header doesn't actually prevent google from archiving
your post, it just stops the indexes from showing it, meaning nobody can
read it. Dunno what they keep all the rest for; some have suggested that
corporate clients who pay for direct access to google's database are able to
access these posts.

> Use another account (possibly even your "real" e-mail address) to solicit
> replies, but don't post it verbatim in the message body. Instead of
> "username@domain.com" use something that that a human can decipher, but
> won't look like an e-mail address to the robots - like "username (at)
> domain (dot) com".
>
> You might also want to get creative in how you "spell out" your address,
> since spammers seem to eventually catch on to our latest evasion tricks.
> :-)

Yeah. I wouldn't recommend the (at) and (dot) tricks myself, that would be
just far too easy for a harvestbot to auto-unmunge. When I want to be
emailable in a post, I generally say something like "Oh, it's in the dot net
domain, my username which goes before the at sign is what I've signed here
at the bottom of my post, and the domain is called petitmorte". Making sure
all the different words that are actually part of your email address are
widely separated by other words that aren't part of it, and in the wrong
order, I would have thought is sufficient to baffle any spambots out there.

Of course, spammers are shitheads, and once in a while one of them will
manually browse usenet making unmunged lists of addresses. The only thing
you can do about that is to only ever offer to post your email address
pgp-encrypted to anyone who lets you know they want to mail you... that way
there's no way a spammer reading the post could decrypt it.

          DaveK 

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