[fpc-pascal] Unsolicited messages

[Jonas Maebe]

On 31 Jan 2010, at 15:17, fpclist at silvermono.co.za wrote:

> I'm receiving unsolicited spam messages along with the normal message on this 
> list. Is this happening to anyone else? 
> 
> The email address I use here is for the sole purpose of this subscription.

A spammer tactic I've learned about recently is spambots that automatically subscribe themselves to mailing lists and then start harvesting email addresses from mails sent to the list. They don't post any spam via the mailing list, so you cannot find easily find them. Except that in all cases I've seen until now, they use zeusmail.org addresses for some reason. See e.g. http://www.google.com/search?q=zeusmail+mailing+list+spam

I've just done a search and found six zeusmail.org subscriptions to the fpc-pascal list (and some also to the other FPC lists). When I first learned about this problem (a month ago) I also searched and didn't find any such subscription. I've now banned subscribing using zeusmail.org addresses and removed all of the existing subscriptions (www.zeusmail.org is obviously not a generic free email service, its front page is almost empty).

Of course, this remedy will only work for a short while, since nothing prevents the spammers to set up similar new domains... I don't know a real remedy against this sort of stuff, unless some people start setting up blacklists for these things too and we get a way to integrate them with mailman.

Other than that, Googling for your email address turns up one hit: http://lists.freepascal.org/lists/fpc-other/attachments/20090509/4feed01b/attachment.htm. Apparently someone's email client included an html part as attachment instead of inline, so the archiver didn't sanitise it (since removing anything that looks like an email address from attachments may corrupt them). I cannot edit that file to remove your address though.


Jonas