Newbies/Talk lists

As you've noticed, all the OSM mailing list postings are archived publicly at lists.openstreetmap.org. Though there's some moderate degree of spam-trapping (the @ in e-mail addresses is replaced with 'at'), the addresses are still visible and can be harvested by a moderately intelligent spambot. This is a standard function of the industry-standard software we use to run the lists.

If you're anxious about receiving spam from this address, the best advice is to post from an account on a webmail service with significant spam filtering capabilities (e.g. GMail). You can still subscribe from your normal e-mail address if you like the postings to arrive in your inbox, just don't post from it. Of course, you don't need to subscribe at all to read the postings; services such as Nabble or Gmane will let you read through the web or a newsreader.

Note that this applies only to the OSM mailing lists. Other services (the OSM site itself, the wiki, forum, and this help site) do not expose your e-mail address publicly.