[Rd] Spam messages

[Marc Schwartz]

Hi,

This topic has come up previously, across the R e-mail lists and the spammers need not be subscribers (but could be), but simply reasonably competent HTML scrapers.

If you look at the online archives of the R lists, for example R-Devel for this month:

    https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2016-December/thread.html <https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2016-December/thread.html>

and look at the individual posts, there is only minimal munging of e-mail addresses, which is easily overcome with basic scripting.

This is further compounded by there being a multitude of other places on the web, where actively updated archives of the R lists exist, providing additional sources of e-mail addresses for spammers.

Some of the prior discussions had considered that we might preserve only the list address in the posts sent out (as some groups do) and fully scrape the sender's e-mail address from the post when distributed and archived. However, that approach is not without it's own limitations (e.g. would make cc's and reply-all largely useless, except for off-list discussion) and so no action has been taken since this seems to be a transient issue.

Regards,

Marc Schwartz


> On Dec 6, 2016, at 7:52 AM, Mario Emmenlauer <mario at emmenlauer.de> wrote:
> 
> 
> The problem is not specific to this list. Any kind of public
> list may mean that other subscribers (or even the whole world)
> can see your email address. So whenever you mail to a (public)
> list there is a good chance that afterwards, you will get more
> spam. Not really much can be done about it, at least not on
> the side of the list, since any of the subscribers may be a
> spammer, who can know...
> 
> All the best,
> 
>    Mario
> 
> 
> 
> On 06.12.2016 14:13, frederik at ofb.net wrote:
>> Yes, I just heard from Amy Kristen who is "looking to meet new
>> guys"...
>> 
>> On Fri, Dec 02, 2016 at 11:31:56AM -0800, Kenny Bell wrote:
>>> Have others received spam messages after posting to this list?
>>> 
>>> The two problem emails are HodgesDonna485 at yahoo.com and
>>> amykristen4003 at octbm.com.
>>> 
>>> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>>> 
>>> ______________________________________________
>>> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>>> 
>> 
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>> 
> 
> 
> 
> Viele Gruesse,
> 
>    Mario Emmenlauer
> 
> 
> --
> BioDataAnalysis GmbH, Mario Emmenlauer      Tel. Buero: +49-89-74677203
> Balanstr. 43                   mailto: memmenlauer * biodataanalysis.de
> D-81669 München                          http://www.biodataanalysis.de/
> 
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