[Qt-interest] [OT] RE: QFtp put functions has a bug?

[Oliver.Knoll at comit.ch]

Srdjan Todorovic wrote on Wednesday, February 11, 2009 5:03 PM:

> ...
> Why could a spam-bot/harveser program (written in Qt? ;) ) not be
> subscribed to this list and harvest the addresses directly? Or a
> spammer subscribed to this list and then have a program read the
> mailbox and harvest addresses this way?   

Technically they could - in practice that's not worth the effort, because it would require manual intervention ("subscription") and only yield a few hundred or thousand valid email addresses. What's worse, those would be of programmers, so unless you sell/advertise pizza over the internet... ;) (That's why also some people prefer to subscribe with spam.goes.here at nowhere.net to lists ;)

"Harvesters" want to go "big scale": they follow *automatically* any URL they find on the net - for example the Qt archive web pages - and grab everything which looks like an email address. They don't bother about subscribing to individual mailing lists out there - I hope ;)

Cheers, Oliver

-- 
Oliver Knoll
Dipl. Informatik-Ing. ETH
COMIT AG - ++41 79 520 95 22