Email Exposure and Security

[Grant Barrett]

According to a conversation I had with Tony Aristar in 2003, the
LinguistList folks put in place sturdy technological barriers which
will prevent robots and spiders from automatically scavenging email
addresses off the pages. It looks like they have done so: if I do a
search for any number of my posts or email addresses in Google, the
archives are not returned as a result. Given the high level of
technical aptitude shown by the folks at LinguistList, I trust that
they have also blocked other indexers, spiders, and robots.

Of course, this blocking does not prevent anyone from going into the
archives and scavenging by hand, but then, anyone can also subscribe to
the email list and retrieve addresses from messages they receive, if
they want to do it the hard way, which spammers, being notoriously
stupid and lazy, don't. However, we may also require some text
obfuscation on the page itself, in the code. I'll ask.

Using the SET ADS-L CONCEAL command only omits your address on the list
of ADS-L subscribers which folks can request directly from the listserv
software.

> Why not [...]ut the URL for the ADS-L front door
> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?S1=ads-l

The URL for the ADS-L archive front door IS on that page, bold and
underlined, in the second paragraph.

Grant Barrett
ADS Webmaster
gbarrett at worldnewyork.org