Stigers, Greg [And] writes:
> One reason for objecting to the Deja News feed is that spammers troll those
> feeds for addresses to spam. No feed, less spam, no need for the
> X-no-Archive:yes up top.

I think that you meant to say "Usenet newsfeed" instead of "Deja News feed".

Deja News is simply a site receiving a full Usenet newsfeed that offers a web
interface for searching their database of archived articles, as well as
another web interface for posting new articles that will be propagated to
the rest of the Usenet world.

While it would be technically possible to programmatically pound away at
the Deja News web interface to harvest e-mail addresses from articles, that
would definitely be "the hard way" and the load on the web server would
probably catch the attention of the Deja News webmasters.

Instead spammers who want to harvest e-mail addresses from Usenet articles
merely buy a newfeed from their ISP (probably all ISPs offer newsfeeds to
their customers with dedicated high bandwidth connections).  It's trivial to
configure Usenet server software like INN to scan for e-mail address patterns
and log them to a database.

FWIW, you are only deceiving yourselves if you think "X-no-Archive: yes"
accomplishes anything.  X-no-Archive: is merely an optional *advisory* header
that software is perfectly capable of ignoring.  Reputable sites like Deja
News may honor it, but I'm sure that every spammer with a newfeed ignores that
header.
--
Mark Bixby                      E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Coast Community College Dist.   Web: http://www.cccd.edu/~markb/
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