Re: Please help me, I am receiving large amounts of spam as a result of my posting.
On Tue, Oct 01, 2002 at 02:14:54PM +0200, Santiago Vila wrote:
> > It would be polite to note that it is not our intention to get people
> > spammed by keeping archives,
>
> But we do not help to fight spam if we keep email addresses in the archives.
> We can keep archives without keeping email addresses.
Like Alfie said, addresses are useful as well.
> I think they would be equally useful if they would not contain private
> email addresses.
I think not. Being able to contact the posters directly is a perfectly valid
feature we use via SMTP, and I see no reason not to use it via HTTP other
than to confuse spambots.
Besides, they can subscribe a spam harvesting bot to the lists, it's
perfectly automatable...
> > Besides, the spam problem doesn't go away with removing messages
> > from the archive -- both because spammers have probably already
> > hardvested the address, and because there are several other archives
> > on the web and elsewhere where they have probably also have
> > harvested it already.
>
> I've heard this argument before and it's bogus.
>
> This is like saying: "National laws against spam will not solve the
> spam problem because spammers will always be able to spam from another
> country". It's bogus because if every country had laws against spam
> then there would not be other countries to spam from. So, national
> laws against spam will actually *help* to fight spam in the long run.
>
> What we should not do is "since doing such and such will not solve
> the spam problem, we will do nothing at all".
>
> It's sad that we are not aware enough of how much we help spammers.
Conversely, don't we cave in to them by disabling features?
One by one, feature removals could reduce the archive into a state where
it's quite suboptimal: first the addresses go, then the names, then random
posts people don't want up there because of whatever reason they have, ...
It definitely seems wiser in the long run to fight spam by directly fighting
spammers, spamhausen etc, and not by eliminating everything that may be
abused... which is what your national laws do. They don't tell us to stop
keeping archives that include emails, they tell spammers not to abuse them.
Personally I'm not completely decided on whether to support address
munging/removal or not, because I can't say any arguments from either side
of the discussion are terribly decisive.
--
2. That which causes joy or happiness.
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