Re: mailto:

On Tue, Feb 20, 2018 at 09:02:57AM +0000, Richard Torrens (lists) wrote:
>
> This system appears to defeat spammers - most of the email addresses that
> have been spammed seem to have been harvested from computers by malware.

We're getting dangerously off-topic here, but they mostly harvest them from:
- usenet and mailing lists such as this (they are so bountiful,
the harvesters simply special-case the mitigations that
mailing list archival websites use to obscure addresses)

- brute-forcing people's email passwords, not only to send spam
through but to harvest addresses from your INBOX and address
book.

- Guesswork. Attempting to send an email is cheap, so when you
get a list of current domains, you simply try all the common
stuff, like "lists" or "tim".

Doing it on your website with mailto: links isn't worth it these days,
spidering the web like that is comparitively expensive compared to the
above techniques.

B.