Re: zsh lists being used for spam-gathering?

[Sweth Chandramouli <sweth@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Dec 12, 1997 at 06:20:22PM +0000, Bruce Stephens wrote:
> luomat@xxxxxxxx said:
> > Is there a way for someone to get a list of all the people subscribed
> > to this list? 
> 
> Not directly, I think, but the mailing lists also appear on web pages, which 
> seems like a probable way they might have got hold of email addresses.  It 
> seems improbable that anybody would bother going through mailing lists 
> nowadays (it's just too awkward, I'd have thought), but it's known that people 
> do web crawling.

	if i were to start spamming people, actually, listservs are one of the 
first places i would turn to for addresses--since list-moms tend to prune out 
defunct addresses fairly quickly, the spammer would have a much higher ratio of 
valid-to-invalid addresses.  also, many lists don't alter the subject in any way 
to indicate that it is from a particular list, so unless the recipients use (as 
i do) filtering based on the headers, they are probably used to at least looking 
at many emails per day, none of which they know the contents of; spammers dream 
of a world full of people who will read every email that comes into their inbox. 
smartlist, listserv, and majordomo all also support (by default, i think) 
addresses to which a subscriber to the list can write in order to get 
information about the list; usually, one of those informational options is a 
list of all other subscribers (who haven't gone to the trouble of setting 
themselves up as "hidden").
	i'll bring this back to zsh by asking a question:
	i've been playing recently with the parameter expansion features of ls 
in zsh, and have been totally blown away by them.  as far as i can tell, they do 
almost everything that find can do (really, they do everything, if you count 
using them (in backquotes) as the input for a for-do loop), and in most cases, 
they do it faster.  has anyone done any comparisons of speed between find and 
the zsh ls?  how about taking into account time to start up zsh itself?  for 
scripts that i write for other people (who usually don't use zsh), i tend to use 
find, whereas for spur-of-the-moment command-line scripts, i use zsh-ls; would 
the faster execution of the ls verison be offset by the time to load zsh if i 
were to make all of my ksh scriptfiles into zsh verisons instead?  (actually, in 
that case, i guess it would be a question of how much longer than ksh zsh takes 
to load; i know zsh is much larger, but if it is loading dynamically, it 
shouldn't take that long to start up, right?)

	expanding parameters,
	sweth.
-- 
"Countin' on a remedy I've counted on before
Goin' with a cure that's never failed me
What you call the disease
I call the remedy"  -- The Mighty Mighty Bosstones