https and SSL can protect your mail address from being harvested and used as spam?

Question

I manage a googlegroups with many hundreds of people, and often happens that spam is sent to our mailing list even if it's for members only.

The most annoying is when the spam arrives with the address of members.

Which suggestions can I give to the people to reduce the risk of their mail being harvested by spam bots? I usually suggest to enable https on their webclient and SSL on their desktop client and to run an antivirus session regularly.

Is this a good way to avoid the problem or it doesn't change anything?

Answer 1

No it is not. Neither of your recommendations have anything to do with spam bots harvesting mail addresses. Those are normally scraped from a website/number of websites. The best advise you can give them is never to post their emails to a website pernamently, or use something to confuse the bots, such as [ad] instead of @. Also as you can spoof the address of the sender, you pretty much can't avoid spam sent with sender address of the members, once they have those addresses (e.g. I get even spam from my own address).

Answer 2

There is hope!, as Cyber-Guard Design proposed ask your users to not write down their mail addresses normally. For example normally you would write ur mail adress like

[email protected]  insted do => myname[a_t]somedomain[d_o_t]com

That should do the trick, for most bots at least