(ET) Spam problems

["David Roden (Akron OH USA)" <roden ald net>]

It's off topic - related to this list and not the ET - so I hope you all 
will 
forgive me for bringing it up this way.  

Not everyone here may know that there is an archive for this list.  It's 
located at :

http://cosmos2.phy.tufts.edu/mhonarc/elec-trak/

It starts in 1998 and goes right up to the present day.  

This is a good thing, because it means that if you remember seeing 
someone's 
post but not what it said, you have a searchable archive.

It's also a bad thing, because all of our email addresses are right out in 
plain sight, for the spammers to harvest.  

And harvest they do.  I've been getting spam on an address I used just a 
couple of times to post to this list, so I ran a web search on the 
address.  
The above archive was the only bona fide hit.  It's possible that the 
spammers 
got it somewhere else, but web searchbots looking for 
"something somewhere foo" are still a widely used method of adding to the 
millions of addresses the spammers already have.

Mhonarc, the utility which compiles the ET archive, has a built in option 
to 
obfuscate email addresses.  I'd like to ask whomever has some measure of 
control over the archive to arrange for that option to be applied.  

Also, a sed script could easily be run on the existing entries (maybe 
overnight) to convert all instances of "@" to something like "NOSPAM." 

Any chance of getting this done?  Otherwise I'll have to start posting 
from an 
address that forwards all replies to the bit bucket, which will make 
things 
inconvenient for all concerned.

Thanks for your patience with this post.


David Roden - Akron, Ohio, USA
1991 Solectria Force 144vac
1991 Ford Escort Green/EV 128vdc
1970 GE Elec-trak E15 36vdc
1974 Avco New Idea 36vdc
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On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!], 
"Pray, Mr.  Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will
the right answers come out?"  I am not able rightly to apprehend the
kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

                               -- Charles Babbage
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