[meta-sig] RE: [meta-sig] [Fwd: Re: [META-SIG] Switchover to mailman]

[Guido van Rossum]

> I think subscribership info should be publicly viewable by default.
> If specific individuals wish to hide their address from visibility, I
> would not deny them that privilege.  Kind of like phone #'s in the
> phone book.

I certainly don't mind that anybody can see that I am a member of the
meta-sig.  But I do mind if spammers can easily scrape my address off
the subscription page.  (This is the same problem with the phone book: 
I want to be listed, but I don't want telemarketers to have easy
access to the phone book in electronic form.  Unfortunately Bell
Atlantic makes too much money off telemarketers to give me that
option. :-( )

Findmail has an elegant solution (maybe Deja News too): they publish
the person's name, with a link to a page that contains the email
address.  This makes it sufficiently expensive for spammers to gather
emails (since they would have to download a page for each address) to
discourage them; if necessary, the server can impose a limit on the
number of times such pages can be downloaded from a given address.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)