On Wed, Oct 16, 2002 at 08:11:43PM +0200, Santiago Vila wrote: > > >We should not disseminate email addresses from people who subscribed > > >to our lists or allow others to do so. If this means forbidding > > >archives of Debian lists which do not protect email addresses, let's > > >forbid them. > > Why not? > Because when someone posts something to a list, what he/she usually > wants is to communicate a message (specially the contents) to the > subscribers of such list, not giving his email address to the whole > universe. Debian mailing lists are *public*, which means that all information posted to them, including the addresses of the senders, is available to the world. This means spammers can get it, but it also means legitimate users can get it; you can't screw over one group without screwing over the other. As far as I'm concerned, we're all in this together. Spam is a global problem, that isn't going to be solved by people trying to "protect" their email addresses by making them hard to find / hard to decipher. I'm a postmaster for 600 domains, and it's bloody impossible to filter out legitimate postmaster issues from the thousands of spam-related bounces that are generated every week -- even with protection in place to detect when the mailserver is being flooded. I have little sympathy for people who complain about two or three spams a day, when these same people are unwilling to exert political and economic pressure on spammers. I have NO sympathy for people who think the solution is to hide from the problem. If you want to hide from the Internet, unplug your modem and throw it away. Then you won't need to post to Debian mailing lists at all. Otherwise, you're going to get spam, until and unless we can find effective means of deterring people from trying to spam in the first place. Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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