And I upvoted your post for completely valid criticism.

Keeping that in mind, these aren't the spammers you're looking for, move along. I suppose I could justify the post by saying any one of the following:

• I was trying to help him learn Perl better by pointing him to some relevant modules.
• He could have been very inarticulate and failed to mention a legitimate goal he was trying to accomplish.
• The information in the post may be of use to someone with a legitimate goal. Spidering an intranet to retrieve statistics about the availability of contact information perhaps.
• A couple hundred spams is nothing compared to the major offenders. Even if the post directly causes these couple hundred spams, by helping out people with legitimate goals it more than balances out.

I'm sure I could think up many more, but to be honest, they're not very good reasons. My point was that responses like •Re: Re: how do I extract contact data from websites? do nothing to help the situation and only push this site closer to Slashdot-like discussion levels (which is a bad thing). So write filters, lobby your government, write secure software to reduce the number of open relays, but don't waste time with posts like that.

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.