How seriously are female posters taken on this DIY forum?

[John Rumm]

We were talking about spam. If you have no objection to i,t then feel free to put your email address about a bit! Perhaps uk.d-i-y is not considered rich harvesting fodder anyway and you will get away with it. Visit some of the more heavily harvested groups and you may not.

We have some clients who have a small office (half a dozen people) where on a bad day each of them used[1] to receive upto 700 spam emails! Most of them result from the actions of a clueless webmaster who published all their (unobfuscated) email addresses on a highly visible and heavily linked to web site. What do you suppose that cost them is lost productivity?

[1] at least before we introduced them to baysian filtering, and updated the web site ;-)

As for your physical name and address, yes lots of folks will know it, and many more can find out with relatively little difficulty should they want to. Is that bad? In most cases no. Sometimes it might be if you are unlucky. The more places it is recorded and the more people who know it, then the greater the probability that someone may make improper use of it. I appreciate that does not concern you, however I expect that is not the same for all of us.

Many security breaches can only occur because people are too willing to give away information that they consider to be of little value. After all what harm can it do? However lots of little bits of "low value" information soon add up to to more than the sum of the parts.

[Ian White]

Human harvesters would be on piece rates. If you munge the entire address into character codes, they'll skip to another website that's easier.

The trick is very well known, but it's still surprisingly effective.

[John Rumm]

I would have thought human harvesters would be looking at the rendered html though... still one can hope!

[Mary Fisher]

No, I was replying to the question asked about telling people your name when you meet them. I think it's just the same as broadcasting one's address.

I do.

What would be the problem? This is the question, which has not been answered satisfactorily.

Don't they recognise spam before they open it? Iwouldn't employ anyone who couldn't. It's mostly very obvious.

No,but no-one has been able to give a reason which is sensible to me and some others here.

If you can explain to my satisfaction I might be converted.

I have nothing to hide.

Mary

[DJC]

I think it is a two stage process. Someone wants to send you mail, the address thereby gets into their 'sent mail' file and possibly is auto saved to an address book. They get infected by a spam bot, your mail address gets distributed...

[John Rumm]

That is also a real problem - but very different from skimming addresses from web pages...

[John Rumm]

What about those you don't meet, or those who you would prefer not to?

Think throught the implications a little...

The vast majority are obvious, but as I said think through the implications. How long does it take someone to visually skim through all the headers and mark them for deletion? Then actually open and look at those that may or may not be legit. Half an hour per person per day is about the average - that's three man ours per day that was being lost - they cost money. The you have to deal with the handful of zero day exploit viruses/worms that slip past the scanners etc.

Next think of the bandwidth - at its peek it was getting on for 5000 emails / day, that first implication was a big upgrade to the email server. Next there was half a gig of extra network traffic / month over their broadband connection - enough to incur extra costs for download quota, and also slowing down the whole team when accessing the web and delaying outgoing emails.

Now unless you go posting to the alt.sex hierarchy of usenet I don't expect you could get anything like that level of problem from usenet posts - yet.

How about: fraud.

Look at the recent case that made the headlines when scammers targeted the online tax credits system using stolen identities of civil servants. The walked off with millions of our money. All the scammers had was a few bits of low value information (name, address, and NI number).

How much information does it take to climb your way up the identity ladder to the point where you can apply for loans or credit cards in someone elses name? To redirect their pension or benefits payments to a new account? Redirect their post for a few days even?

Well if your only answer is "Yes, but that does not bother me", then you never will get a "reason" that is sensible to you.

I doubt it... ;-)

We have had this discussion before, so no point in going over old ground.