Email addresses posted in the body of usenet posts rarely attract spam... (the from addresses will get harvested though)
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- posted
13 years ago
Beware, scammers
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- posted
13 years ago
Really? That's a surprise.
In that case, the address of the latest - patriceoreilly snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.co.uk
- is probably not going to be picked up.
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13 years ago
There was a quite detailed investigation done a few years back by the CDT in the US, looking at where addresses get harvested the most. A few interesting bits came out of that. Usenet was scraped for addresses (especially some of the predictable alt.sex. groups), but addresses that were in the body or in the header but obfuscated seemed fairly safe.
The situation has got less clear since there are quite a number of sites that republish groups on the web without obfuscation, although usenet as a whole has probably declined in popularity.
The other one that was interesting and still seems to hold true, is that when scraping web pages for addresses, it tends to be done by searching the plain text without making any attempt to render the content. So obfuscation that makes addresses unreadable in the HTML is usually enough to protect them even if they appear readable on the final page.