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> It's not possible for anyone to get the list
> of subscribers to TECHWR-L.
>
> That said, Andrew's point was correct about
> the fact that there is a Usenet gateway
> to bit.listserv.techwr-l, and it would be
> possible, if you have posted to the list,
> for spammers to cull your email address from
> there. Similarly, it would be possible for
> spammers to cull email addresses from the
> TECHWR-L archives. (I have no feel for how
> likely either of those events would be.)
Unfortunately, I suspect there's some variant of
Murphy's Law at work here. Any address that is
used in public on the net will eventually be
picked up by spammers.
Certainly they have robots that dig addresses
out of a newsfeed. That has been widespread
for 15 years that I know of, perhaps longer.
They also have spiders that crawl around web
sites looking for addresses.
And of course, there's nothing to prevent some
spammer from subscribing to the list and getting
addresses that way.
Here's an interesting defense. The State of
Washington has passed an anti-spam law. For
every piece of spam, the user can sue for
$500 and the receiving ISP for $1000. So a
Washington user group have set up:
For $12 a year you can have an address there
that automatically forwards to your actual
account wherever. No spammer with more than
.05% of a clue will spam such an address.
Of course, most spammers fail that test, so
you will get spam. Just forward it to the
admins at wa-state-resident.com. They have
a lawyer on retainer and a policy of suing
for their $1000 per message whenever they
can find the spammer.
Possible defenses for ISPs or other sites that
run their own mail service:
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