On Tue, Jan 08, 2002 at 01:44:27PM +1100, Kefyn Judson (ENZ) wrote: Have you had many of the online site email addresses leaked? No, not so far... it seems then it's likely most address harvesting is done via Usenet (probably not so common) and by using spiders to walk online HTTP mailing list archives such as this one. But without hard facts this is pure speculation. I should also point out, people posting with email address constructs like user(a)nospam.domain.com and user.nospam(a)foo.com is pointless, I have shown in the past a simple sed script can clean up 90% of the common 'anti-spam' measures as used by people in nz.general (the sample I chose at the time) and with a little effort I think 95% should be trivial obtainable... at the same time making legitimate replies problematic (if I have to remove a nospam, you won't get email from me). Furthermore, if we assume having nospam in your email address was sufficient to not get spammed (ie. spammers would filter out any addresses with /nospam/ in them) I would use cw(a)nospam.f00f.org as my real email address. Sadly, spammers don't seem to clean addresses very well (if at all), mostly because lists of addresses are sold and like all things touched my marketriods, bigger numbers are better (hence there is little if any incentive to produce lists of any quality). --cw - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog