> Some of you may be interested to know that the gnats PR database is
> being used as a source of email addresses for spam mail.

Perhaps it is just the 'netbsd-bugs' mailing list.

> There are two machines on my network which have never been used for
> any purpose other than NetBSD testing and hacking.  No mail has ever
> left these machines, except for NetBSD PR's.  No news reading or
> posting has ever occurred on these machines, and neither machine has a
> web browser.  I can say wih some confidence that one of these machines
> has never FTPed to any site except ftp.netbsd.org.  As far as I know,
> the only two places the names of these machines would be found is in
> my domain's DNS servers, and the gnats database.  Since the DNS server
> doesn't have a full email address, and the gnats database does, my
> conclusion is that someone is grovelling gnats to get addresses for
> spam.

Unfortunately it is far too easy for the bastards to get valid email
addresses.  Especially with mailing list archives stored all over the
world.  I just did a quick grep through the netbsd-bugs mailing lists
and came up with ~1200 email addresses.  I already get too much spam to
this email address, which I pretty much only use for NetBSD mailing
lists.

-Andrew
-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Andrew Gillham                            | This space left blank
gillham@whirlpool.com                     | inadvertently.
I speak for myself, not for my employer.  | Contact the publisher.