email address being harvested from ports website

[Ernie Luzar]

Hello list;

I maintain 4 ports and within the last 6 months I have started receiving 
large amounts of spam on the ports maintainer email address. Last week I 
went through the process of changing the maintainers email addresses and 
within 3 days I started receiving spam on the new email addresses.

The http://www.freebsd.org/ports/ website is being harvested for email 
addresses.

We all have personally experienced spam email. Now the volunteers who 
create and maintain the ports in the Freebsd ports collection are being 
targeted with spam.

In todays world of spam emails containing payloads of bots, viruses and 
mullware, I think its past time for www.freebsd.org/ports/ to stop 
displaying any email address at all.

I release this is only a simple solution targeted at the script kiddies.
Any seriously harvester could always download the complete ports tree 
source and harvest the maintainer email address from the ports Makefile.

To address this problem in a way to make it totally go away, a new way 
of handling the ports maintainers email address in the ports system is 
fast becoming a priority.

Separation of the maintainers email address from the ports Makefile is 
the ultimate solution. People on the ports team who know the behind 
scenes workings of the port system are far better suited to develop a 
new method of accomplishing this.

Lets look at this in a different way. I believe that email address are 
consitered as private personal information and covered under the privacy 
information U.S. law which says they can not be exposed to the public.

This post is intended to generate discussion and shine light on what may 
be a legal oversight by the ports team.


Thank you in advance for you interest and comments.