[Mailman-Developers] Protecting email addresses from spam harvesters

[Chuq Von Rospach]

On 2/25/02 9:56 PM, "Barry A. Warsaw" <barry@zope.com> wrote:

> - Some place that password reminders come from.  Since this will be
> receiving bounces, it ought to be a real list.

Cautionary tale here.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I decided to do my users a
favor, and created an over-arching meta-list of all subscribers
(effectively, an umbrella list of all lists on my site). I figured users
would appreciate getting the monthly messages and admin notices once,
instead of once-per-subscription.

Silly me. All it did was start a continuing set of firefights with people
who demanded the right to unsubscribe from the umbrella list. And they were
quite unpleasant about it. I never did figure this out, either -- people
that never complained about getting five copies of the monthly notice
started screaming bloody murder when they started getting ONE, because they
insisted on the right to get zero.

It was such a nasty situation I blew the whole thing up after a few months,
and went back to mailing admin and monthly notices to each list. And people
stopped screaming. 

So just be aware -- if you create a server-wide "list", you may well be
creating a point of conflict, based on my experience. And it wasn't a
situation where, at least for those users, "if you subscribe to a list on
this site, you have to get this" was an acceptable answer to these people.
So instead of getting a message once, they get it four or five times, and
since they come in the name of the list they subscribed to, evidently that's
okay.

Go figure. But be wary here, Barry. My experience doing something very
similar was horrible.


-- 
Chuq Von Rospach, Architech
chuqui@plaidworks.com -- http://www.chuqui.com/

No! No! Dead girl, OFF the table!