Re: RFD: Use of @debian.org email addresses

[John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org>]

On Sat, Jan 24, 2004 at 12:20:57PM +0100, Michael Banck wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 24, 2004 at 05:39:17PM +1100, Sam Johnston wrote:
> I think the main problem of the DMUP WRT @d.o is the sole coverage of
> *incoming* mail, thus stating (at least to me) that it's more about
> being bandwidth-aware than being concious about the outward appereance.

Since when did Debian turn from a group of hackers to a group of
marketing suits?

This idea that e-mail addresses confer a notion of "speaking on behalf
of the organization that owns the domain" is entirely laughable.

Let me give you a few examples:

1. In the early days of the Internet, virtually nobody had e-mail
addresses aside from their employer or university.  An e-mail from
berkeley.edu does not mean this is a statement on behalf of Berkeley.

2. I used to have the address @southwind.net.  southwind.net was
my Internet provider.  Southwind employees also has e-mail addresses
@southwind.net, which looked the same as customer addresses.  Would you
automatically assume that anyone sending an e-mail from southwind.net
spoke on behalf of the company?

3. I had the e-mail address @cs.twsu.edu, for the Computer
Science department at Wichita State University.  So did several thousand
other students, faculty, and staff.  Nobody was so stupid as to think
that any e-mail from there was an official statement from the
University.

The list goes on and on.  People today have @aol.com addresses or
@earthlink.net addresses.  Do you think that every one of those millions
of people are representing their ISP in public?

I really don't understand where this notion comes from. 

> Furthermore, I believe that "outgoing" @d.o mail is a bigger problem than
> incoming mail, because that's when you actually appear as a DD to (at
> least a subset of) the internet. I don't care so much whether DDs get

And here's a newsflash for you: *anyone*, not just Debian-related
people, can set their From: address to be @debian.org.

Any Debian policy will be rather ineffective combating that.

> believe DDs should limit their From: foo@debian.org header to Debian

I'm tempted to use a "then only the spammers will have @debian.org"
argument here :-)

> related activities and the big majority of the project seems to agree
> with me.

Somewhere around 70 people is not even close to a majority of the
developers.  In fact, it's a small minority.

-- John