[Mailman-Developers] Interesting study -- spam on postedaddresses...

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Mon, Feb 18, 2002 at 01:57:50PM -0800, Chuq Von Rospach wrote:
> Users of a mail list have a right to be protected from spam caused by your
> mail list.

Ok.  I don't want to start a philosophical war here, and I'm perfectly
familiar with the concept enshrined in the phrase "that's fine, sonny,
but this here's the fleet"...

But I still think it's important to keep firmly uppermost in our minds
here that the spam is not *caused* by the mailing list.

Nor is it caused by Google

It's *caused* by the spammers.

I realize that we have practical considerations to deal with which are
much closer to our feet, but I think that it's quite important that we
don't lose sight of the forest for the trees.

I personally can't think of any method of programmatically obscuring
email addresses that can't be programmatically reversed.  So, I'm
thinking that having a publicly and privately accessible version may be
the only answer.  I do, though, sort of like the "turing test" idea --
I've often found a useful contact for a project by Googling to mailing
lists; having to subscribe to get an email address for an off-llist
contact is too steep a hill to climb.

I figure if it's a "public" mailing list (by which I mean, one to which
anyone is invited to belong), then such inquiries are the price you
pay, so I think this is a reasonable analogy, and thereby, justification
for my argument here.  Others may disagree.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra@baylink.com
Member of the Technical Staff     Baylink                             RFC 2100
The Suncoast Freenet         The Things I Think
Tampa Bay, Florida        http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

   "If you don't have a dream; how're you gonna have a dream come true?"
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