On Tue, 19 Dec 1995, Rich Graves wrote:
Personally, I think anyone who uses dejanews as a way to grep Usenet is an idiot, but since this idiot actually did spend several hours doing so, and then sent unsolicited commercial email to several thousand people, it's worth listening to him.
[snip] [START] <attila> "forcing" a change on DejaNews to strip addresses would defeat the "redeeming" value of such a database. Since I, like many, occasionally fall into the trap of opening my response before clutching in my brain, I used DejaNews to "count" the gaffes! Fortunely, none on that search, just the usual sloppy keyboard entry. and, coming down on DejaNews just puts the fire out in just one room of a conflagration. [CONTINUE]
Here it is:
When one of these mailers goes to do a search (and from what I hear, many of them do it on regular intervals to get new names) they cannot do a TERSE search. Why? Because it cuts off the email addresses if you notice the output. They cannot obtain addresses from this data.
So what do they do? They do a VERBOSE search and this way the email addresses are completely listed.
Make a change to this VERBOSE search option so that it will only list the partial email address, and you will eliminate THOUSANDS, if not millions of unwanted email messages on the Net.
I guarantee if they made this change to the site it would make a HUGE difference. From what I hear, most newsreaders only list news post lists by "author" and not by email address, so these companies cannot easily strip names through regular newsgroup programs, and must use a service (like Deja News) to compile large email lists.
[snip] [START] <attila> Searching with a news reader message by message would be more than painful! all they need to do to obtain names from any newsgroup is to scan the entire news base, or groups of interest. It took me less than a minute to strip names from the alt.religion tree. I dont think the spammers are too worried about adding a few names when groups are sorted by interest anyway. for amusement, I have started to code a simple program which takes a feed from procmail where known spammers are listed and it prepends a message about spamming and send 1 - n copies to the offenders' PostMaster. ...and, I will send them from my own address as a token of my affection.... The only aggravation is adding offender to procmail after finding the source as many are using remailers. If they have 800 numbers, there are always auto-dialers with a message.. .. I hate to waste the bandwidth, but the spammers are getting out of hand and procmail -> /dev/null is less than satisfying! [END] <attila>