email addresses and spam

[Walter Ian Kaye]

At 12:20 p -0700 05/24/2007, Chuck Swiger didst inscribe upon an 
electronic papyrus:

>On May 24, 2007, at 12:02 PM, Walter Ian Kaye wrote:
>>All right, who released my email address to spammers?
>
>Nobody.  Spammers routinely search for email addresses by scraping 
>Google, websites, mailing list archives, and even word-list 
>dictionaries or random number generators.
>
>>I send mail to ports at freebsd.org, and 2 weeks later I get spam.
>>That is not cool, people. You MUST make sure that never happens.
>>Now I have to blacklist this address. Sheesh.
>
>Welcome to the Internet, as (presumably!) you are new here.

Hardly new. Been here for 15 years.

>The FreeBSD postmaster already spends a lot of resources to try to 
>keep these mailing lists (mostly) spam-free, but there's nothing 
>that  we can do to prevent a spammer from sending email to you after 
>you've  chosen to make your email address available by sending mail 
>to a  public list, and this is going to be true of other mailing 
>lists  elsewhere, web forums, Usenet, and so forth.

I had NO idea this was a public list. I THOUGHT it was a private 
distribution to the ports people. Now you (all) understand my 
surprise.

>Most people deal with spam by setting up some combination of MTA 
>checking, greylisting, and spam-filtering via Amavis/SpamAssassin/ 
>dspam/ClamAV/etc rather than creating new email addresses, but you 
>can do as you see fit.

I do both. In fact, I wrote my own spam filter in Perl, and it 
deletes 95% of the email which arrives, catching 99% of the spam. I 
had *whitelisted* this special recipient address to ensure I got the 
mail I wanted, but now I see I cannot keep it whitelisted, or else it 
will be whitelisting spam as well. :/

Perhaps I can conditionally whitelist it if ports at freebsd.org is one 
of the recipients. Maybe that's the best setup.

So now that everything's clear (I hope), let's put this thread to rest.

Thank you.