Email address use
The email address, in recent years, has become a highly prized piece of currency among spammers (AKA mass-emailers, junk mailers, jerkyheads.)
Because of this, spammers have come up with countless devious ways to gather email addresses from public web pages.
The OLPC Wiki 5,000+ pages are publically available, so please do not post somebody's email address on the wiki unless you're certain they don't mind. This includes using <mailto:> links, which are just as visible as plain text addresses to address-collecting programs.
Want to help clean the site up? Then pitch in. If you see an email address in the wiki, you can safely change it to the form of "foo AT bar DOT com" and post a note to the author of the article asking if they really want to advertise personal information in a public site. Please remember that there are a few public email addresses that are OK to leave intact (? are there really any that want to collect spam?).
A little more detail, for those who are interested:
- Using "obscure" formats like "joe AT example DOT com" is a common practice, but is not total protection. However, it is preferable to using spelled-out email addresses or <mailto:> links. See even more detail at Berkely spam harvest study excerpt. There's also an excellent wikipedia article at Address munging.
- MediaWiki, the software that powers wiki.laptop.org, appears to have been designed to discourage web-crawling robots (like Googlebot) from indexing non-current pages. It does this through the use of <meta> tags. The use of this technique is described at [Google's site]. While it offers no guarantee, in practice this is effective protection, because it prevents spammers from using major search engines to find email addresses in the non-current pages of our wiki.
- MediaWiki also allows anyone to "Email this user" assuming both people are registered and both have confirmed email addresses.
Source
- Freegeek.org (original): http://wiki.freegeek.org/index.php/Email_address_use
