On Fri, 11 Oct 2002, Warhurst, SI (Spencer) wrote:

> Has anyone here had problems with address harvesting from public archives,
> and if so what do you do to block it? We have A-Z & Category pages on our
> main web that link through to all the listname.html pages for lists with
> public archives, so it would be possible for harvesters to follow the links
> through to the archives themselves & pull out addresses.

Make your archives private. Few spammers will bother cultivating addresses
from the contents of a private archives collection.

> Also, while this is not exactly Listserv related (well, it is for me, for
> reasons connected to the above!), does anyone know if there is a particular
> problem with Hotmail where spammers use programs that work like  password
> crackers, in that they use a dictionary of words/names to form email
> addresses and then spam them in the hope they exist? If you have read any
> articles about that kind of thing and could point me to them, that would be
> even better.

Check hotmail's terms of service. I believe Microsoft sells its hotmail
addresses to spammers until individual hotmail users opt out. I am not
certain of this though so I refer you to the terms of service.