Re: just to say thank you
Robert Chute wrote:
> is there any way you can remove my email address from this post
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-cd/2003/10/msg00002.html
> i never knew that saying "thank you" would get so much spam
Welcome to the hostile world of spammers. :-(
Unfortunately what you want is not usually possible in any practical
sense. Mail sent to mailing lists are replicated thousands of times
to all of the subscribers of the mailing list. Many of the
subscribers are automated robots that archive the messages into
archives most of which are available on the Internet. Therefore even
if that particular archive on lists.debian.org were to delete the
message that message would still appear on other archives and in other
people's personal mailboxes and other places. In order to put this
genie back into the bottle you would need to hunt down probably a
thousand locations and remove that message. It is simply not
possible.
Now before you say, "But Google only shows this one location.", let me
say that I am sure this is temporary and other sites will eventually
be threaded. Also viruses on MS machines with your message in
personal mailboxes will respond to and forge from that address and so
eventually it will show up in other strange places too at a "joe-job".
It will remain in the google cache for a while and also there are
"wayback" machines that will archive it and so on.
In any case the place to appeal to in order to handle messages to
mailing lists the "-owner" address, in this case the debian-cd owner
is the debian-cd-owner@lists.debian.org address. That is the list
owner address. No one on the debian-cd mailing list is an
administrator. We are all users here. So that would be the place to
ask your question. I don't know what their policy is on those types
of requests. You might get lucky.
Just so that I can be more depressing for you today (sorry) let me add
that hiding an email address only lasts for so long. Almost certainly
some loved one will think they are doing something nice and send you a
greeting card from a greeting card site and then at that time your
mail address would escape once again into the spammers hands. Friends
and relatives almost never understand how things work well enough to
protect your email address to the extent you would need to keep it
hidden long term and all it takes is one mistake by any of them and it
is once again out in the wild.
But in any case it would already be too late to hide. If you are
already getting spam then that address is already in the hands of
spammers and will always receive spam in the future. I am still
getting spam to addresses that I have turned into a honeypot because
they are a decade obsolete addresses but still they get spam. It is
better to install spam handling tools such as SpamAssassin and fight
the problem head on.
Good luck!
Bob
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