Date: Sun, 8 Dec 2002 11:48:56 -0800 (PST)
To: (Vintners Net Customers)
Subject: spam prevention -- posting to email lists

The most insidious way to get your email address listed in spam databases,
is to post email to any public list.  There are two flavors of this:

1) Some sleazebags will actually subscribe a special-purpose server
   program to high-volume email lists which reads all the mail coming
   from that list simply looking for email addresses to add to it's
   database.

2) Even though the list itself may not be public, some lists are
   archived automatically as public webpages.  An example of this is
   that newsgroups (NNTP) are publically archived -- just go to
   http://groups.google.com/ and you'll be able to find every old
   email address I ever had -- since 1992!

There is no real way to get around this except "abstinence"!

If you've just got to post to a public list, the best thing you can do
is to make up an alias that you will plan to block after it's performed
it's purpose -- namely you've gotten back what you need to know from
that forum.  For details, see:
  http://www.vintners.net/misc/spam.html
click on "Spam Prevention -- General Techniques", then "Using Aliases
on Other sites".

-- 
Mike Lempriere; http://vintners.net/~mikel/
WA State resident: junk email prohibited by law: RCW19.190 & RCW19.86