Re: New UseNet Gateway under construction
Rogier Wolff (R.E.Wolff@BitWizard.nl)
Wed, 28 May 1997 22:37:18 +0200 (MET DST)
David S. Miller wrote:
>
> Date: Wed, 28 May 1997 08:02:53 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Christoph Lameter <clameter@waterf.org>
>
> Spammers can also look at the archives of the linux mailing lists
> which are found in a lot of places. I cannot see any difference
> between a archive and my gating the stuff into usenet.
>
> There is a huge difference, a spammer can more easily acquire tons of
> addresses anonymously without having to go through subscribing to
> various mailing lists, they just need a news feed. Essentially Usenet
> does their work for them, this is why I hate it so much.
>
> A spammer needs to go through some external amount of effort to grab
> things off of a mailing list archive site (be it web based or
> whatever), but with usenet it requires no effort, they just get it,
> and since this is the easiest mechanism it is the one they are most
> likely to use.
There are people selling lists of up to around 30M Email addresses.
The guys that do that WILL go through a little trouble to get
themselves "the largest" list they can find.
As an experiment I once tested that I could find 100k addresses in
about an hour. 10 minutes script-designing and an hour of CPU/disk
time. Running that script several days in a row will give you up to 1M
addresses, but after that you'll have to start doing more complicated
things. Like browsing mailing list archives.
Roger Wolff.