Undisguised e-mail addresses in mapserver archives

[Gerry Creager N5JXS]

The SOBER virus has made a comeback.  It's one of the many that raids an
affected Microsoft user's Outlook address book and starts forging e-mail
from oh, so many folks.  Ove the last 3 or so days, I've gotten bounce
notices from no fewer than 100 different messages I've supposedly
sent... from a Unix account that can receive, but not send, e-mail.  Oh,
and it's an account I usually don't publicize, becuase my main account
has better filter capabilities.

It'd be a reasonable idea to reconfigure the list to hide e-mail
addresses, but unlikely to significantly reduce your exposure in this
case, if you've e-mails more than, say, yourself.

The virus thing is really getting out of control again, and Microsoft
admins (and those of us who have to handle major campus network traffic,
and Unix domains, too) have to spend a lot of time cleaning up the cruft
as a result.

SO: While it's very possible that someone is harvesting this list's
traffic for launching spam, it's as likely... or more so... that someone
you correspond with has a compromised Windows system, likely unpatched,
and doesn't know they're the originator of thousands of spurious e-mail
operations a day.  In your name.

Regards,
Gerry

Jacob Delfos wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> Sorry if this has been brought up before, but the spam problem is taking
> on worse forms for me. Since I have been on the mapserver (and related)
> mailing lists, my e-mail address have been appearing a lot on the
> internet, in a completely undisguised way. The amount of spam I receive
> has since been rising rapidly. Additionally, my address is being spoofed
> lately, such that I occasionally get 100s of bounced messages that I
> didn't send, to people to whom it could not be delivered.
>
> I was hoping it might be possible to configure the mailing lists such
> that e-mail addresses are disguised (even if it is poorly, by replacing
> occurrences of @ with 'at'). I know that I could set up a special
> "mailing list" address, but that makes things a lot harder to manage,
> and people would still send spam in my name.
>
> My address does not appear anywhere else on the internet, so I am quite
> sure that the archives of the mailing lists are the cause. It's not that
> I'm trying to complain, just that a small change could save a lot of
> people a lot of headaches.
>
> regards,
>
> Jacob

--
Gerry Creager -- gerry.creager at tamu.edu
Texas Mesonet -- AATLT, Texas A&M University
Cell: 979.229.5301 Office: 979.458.4020 FAX: 979.847.8578
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