Re: Proposed change for subscriptions...
Paul Johnson <baloo@ursine.ca> said on Tue, 14 Mar 2006 11:16:45 -0800:
> On Saturday 11 March 2006 01:00, Mike McCarty wrote:
> > As an example, I'd like to propose that I be able to subscribe
> > as a *poster* as Mike.McCarty@NOSPAMsbcglobal.net, while receiving
> > the posts as Mike.McCarty@sbcglobal.net, which is my real
> > e-mail address. No e-mail would be sent to the alias, which would
> > be used only to permit posting, but would not be subscribed as
> > a recipient.
>
> Email address munging is considered harmful. It serves only to hinder
> legitimate replies to your email, and utterly ignores the very problem it
> supposedly "resolves." Debian's lists are also open to all posters and
> acccessable via gmane, etc. and those readers do like to post, too. Not to
> mention people replying to list archives.
>
> http://www.interhack.net/pubs/munging-harmful/
Unfortunately, that article was written in 1998, and ignores the
reality of the current situation.
"That is, by having the accounts from which the spam originates
canceled quickly"
Given that almost every peice of spam comes from a different zombie,
of which there are orders of magnitudes more zombies than there were
ever open relays, and their IPs keep on changing because of dynamic
IPs, and then combine this with the majority of abuse departments at
ISPs with originating spam not caring about abuse reports, or even
having a working abuse@ email address.
Zombie machines just aren't being disconnected at the rate they
appear. Get microsoft to fix their bugs (hah!), and the zombie
problem will go away, and spam will become managable again.
I like the argument given in "Additional Hassle for You". The author
hasn't heard of automation, has he?
And then "The end result is that all of the effort you put in to
hiding your address goes to waste." -- worked for me for years. Mind
you, my munging is pretty unusual for the time being. I think the
spammers' two brain cells probably realise that people who munge their
addresses are never going to buy from them anyway. The only spammers
who would be interested in demunging addresses are the authors of
email address CDs, so they can advertise 16,000,001
ADDRESSES!11!!!!!eleven!!!! instead of 16,000,000...
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