[Mailman-Users] Multi list management ..

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Tue Sep 9 05:29:39 CEST 2008


Brad Knowles writes:
 > Khalil Abbas wrote:
 > 
 > > and please, leave the type of mailing aside, if you're a non believer
 > > don't offend other people, I didn't try to shove my beliefs into your
 > > faces and I was really offended with what you said about religion..
 > 
 > I've seen the same sort of thing, and it doesn't really matter what
 > religion you talk about -- zealotry is zealotry,

True enough, and zealous atheists/agnostics can get just as bad, too,
but let's drop this.  We don't know that it didn't happen as he said,
and it's just a popular service that grows by the day.

Even if he *is* spamming or "pushing content out of zealotry", well,
he'll find out what the world thinks of that soon enough, and we've
done our best to warn him.

Sure, it will have some effect on Mailman's rep (or would have, if he
hadn't decided to switch to something else), but that kind of blowback
does happen.  That's why even the BSD and MIT licenses have warranty
disclaimers in them.  Not that that will stop a lawyer from suing if
they think they can frighten you into paying up, nor will it stop the
ignorant from blaming Mailman for the spammers' sins.  We just need to
get used to it.

For the future, I think it's reasonable to tell people "what you're
doing smells like spamming (or whatever) to me", and tell them what
happens to hosts that smell of spam.  If they deny spamming, and get
all self-righteous about the stench, too, then it's on their own
heads.  And of course it's up to each Mailman user to decide whether
they believe that person, and help them (or not) with what they're
doing.  Isn't it?



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