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?" -- Captain Sensible, The Damned (from South Pacific's "Happy Talk")