Re: Debian mailing lists, address munging, news gateway, and the list archives
My position on this, as the linux.* administrator:
- addresses munging will make the gateway harder to use and will break
by-author search with google (I believe that the archiving by google
groups is one of the most important benefits of the gateway).
I believe this to be important enough that munging cannot be justified
by the minor improvements it provides.
- Swen will not last forever, but munged addresses in archives will.
- we do not know that the gateway is the source of addresses used by
Swen, for all I know the infected users could be subscribed to debian
lists. Actually, I would very surprised if a relevant number of the
news servers used by Swen were still working (from a quick check, most
are not).
- most important of all: any serious email usage requires protection
by an antivirus or a similar kind of filter. Using an unfiltered email
address is negligent, and I can't see why we should care.
- a couple of Swen-infected PC are more then enough to fill a typical
unprotected mail account, so the debian lists hardly make the
difference.
- last but not least, I think it's politically wrong to break a widely
used service because of some problem caused by windows users
About address munging in the debian archives: munging is useless, it
does not protect from spammers. There are many other archives of the
debian mailing lists, and our addresses end up on the web in many other
places too.
In the last years I verified that it's basically impossible to use an
address and keep it out of web pages. My debian.org address has been on
a little known web site for half a day and it was immediately harvested,
and still receives spam.
If we want to spend time fighting spam sent to the BTS we'd better look
at implementing the use of DNSBL like CBL and DSBL, which would probably
stop most of the spam the BTS gets these days.
--
ciao,
Marco
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