On Mon, Oct 20, 2003 at 12:16 PM, Paul Johnson wrote:
> Your idea of "easier" does not reflect that of the open source
> community, apparently.
What does "open source" have to do with storing email addresses in
archives in a format that is easily harvested by spam-bots?
Does "open source" == "no privacy"?
By posting to newsgroups and mailing lists over the past five years or
so, I have gotten my (valid, company) email address on tons and tons of
lists. Some days I get more SPAM than valid emails. I understand this
risk and accept it. I use Bayesian filtering on my desktop and it does
a good job.
I typically show up as the number one user of email (by volume of
sent/received) when the Corporate Messaging Group runs reports. This is
mostly from SPAM but also from mailing lists.
Why should newbie users be afraid to post questions to this (or other)
newsgroups? This is ridiculous! The responsibility should ~not~ be put
squarely on the end-user. If it is, the community will stagnate as
others are discouraged by what they see as a Techno-intelligentsia
Elitist group that doesn't want to help the masses!
That seems pretty contrary to open source to me.
How freakin' hard is it to mildly obfuscate the email addresses in the
archives in a manner that would be easily decipherable by a human mind
but would befuddle current SPAM-bots?
If someone's email address shows up in the body of a message, well oops.
But at least doing something like putting the words 'at' and 'dot' in
the archives instead of the actual '@' and '.' would be nice.
Or, as an added bonus, create a Debian email address that goes in the
footer of each list message and if anyone actually sends email to that
address, unsubscribe them from the list and deny them further postings
(if it is a real person, they can just resubscribe).
Thank you!
Jason DePriest
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