William ChopsWestfield wrote:

> Spammers COULD harvest email addresses by subscribing to targeted
> lists and getting the mail directly.  But they don't.  They can't
> be bothered (in general) figuring out which lists would be worthwhile.

I'm not sure that's how the 'community' works. I don't think that most
spammers do harvest at all -- they probably buy the emails by the millions.
The ones who sell probably themselves just put together collections from
various sources: other harvesters, own harvests, whatever. 

If that describes more or less how things work, /one/ harvester that
thought about subscribing to a number of mailing lists (this also can be
automated) would be enough to get the emails in the pond from which they
then get distributed to the spammers. Sooner or later they probably will
end up on some or many such email lists that spammers use. 

Gerhard
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