mad props!! Re: [olug] Fw: OLUG.PHPCONSULTING.COM

[Christopher Cashell]

At Thu, 02 Oct 03, Unidentified Flying Banana Tim - DZ, said:
> So what, who cares if only 20% of the harvested emails are accurate and
> actively read?  So you change the program to also snag mangled emails
> and the accuracy rate drops to 5%, still doesn't matter.  Set your
> 'followed link' (or depth or whatever you want to call it) count to
> about 1000 and you'll end up with 100,000's of email address.  100,000 x
> 0.05 = 5000 or so 'good' addresses.  But since you have no way of
> knowing which ones are good, just send email to all 100,000.  Find an
> open smtp relay on a decent machine and this will take no time at all.

My point was that most e-mail harvesting programs don't bother with
munged or mangled e-mail addresses.  As you pointed out, e-mail
harvesting is already a low percentage bid, in terms of harvested
e-mails vs. active e-mails.  This means that you'd generally be better
off not even bothering with mangled e-mail addresses.

It was meant to address the concerns of a previous poster who didn't
think that the mangling being done on e-mail addresses for the mailing
list archive would help.

Some research[1] that the FTC did a little while back showed that even
simple steps can have dramatic improvements.  They took some 250 newly
created e-mail addresses and 'seeded' a diverse group of locations to
see which addresses were harvested and spammed, and how much.

They found that something like 85% of the addresses posted to web pages
received spam, *IF* the address had a '@' in it.  Those addresses that
were mangled and still had a '@' in it (like user at nospam.domain.com)
received significantly less spam, and those addresses that were mangled
better and didn't have a '@' in it (like user at domain dot com)
received no, or essentially no, spam.
 
They also found that, as most people know, the worst places to have your
e-mail addresses posted are newsgroups and chat rooms.

  [1] I don't have a URL for the report I read offhand, but I can
      probably find it someone is really interested.
> -t

-- 
| Christopher
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| A: No.                                         |
| Q: Should I include quotations after my reply? |
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