[Mailman-Developers] Interesting study -- spam on posted addresses...

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Sun, Feb 17, 2002 at 08:02:11PM -0800, Chuq Von Rospach wrote:
> On 2/17/02 7:48 PM, "Larry McVoy" <lm@bitmover.com> wrote:
> > Second, the point is that even if mailman is 100% perfect, it's not
> > at all clear that that would result in even 1% less spam hitting home.
> > If that's even remotely close, then it seems like efforts could be better
> > spent on screening technology.
> 
> You can't assume your admins are going to want/have screening technology,
> unless you build it into mailman. And I don't think Mailman can simply say
> "hey, that's some other program's problem". 

I'm not in charge of as much mail as you, Chuq, but I've been around
the block a couple times too... and I'm not sure I agree with that.

>                                              We need to find ways to not
> become an easy source for the harvester machines. I DO know from my sites
> that addresses published ONLY as mailman admins get harvested and hit by
> spam. 

Yup, and so does every web page on the net, and it will keep happening
until other things outside our control change markedly -- either on the
network provider TOS enforcement side...

or on the find offenders and burn down their buildings side.

And I'm only partly kidding there.

> To me, it's more an issue of "we can't be part of the problem", not "we're
> the solution". I have a couple of admins who want their addresses removed
> from all public pages -- which I've refused to do, because I think the need
> for access by a user in trouble trumps the admin's privacy.

Damn right it does.  You're gonna be in the movies, you gotta expect to
sign the occasional autograph at dinner.

>                                                            I think at least
> one of those admins has solved it by setting up an admin-specific account,

That's the proper solution.

> and redirecting it to /dev/null, which, if I ever definitely catch him doing
> so, will get him in trouble...

But that's not, and I concur with your appraisal.

> But at the same time -- I don't blame him. And Mailman has a responsibility
> to do something about that, the way we (as admins) have a responsibility ot
> our users not to make them easy fodder for the harvesters by publishing
> archives in an easy to harvest format...

Look up "enabler".  This is an old argument.  I don't know that I
concur that reducing the pain threshold of people who might otherwise
have an incentive to do *useful* work on spam reduction is a good
idea.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra@baylink.com
Member of the Technical Staff     Baylink                             RFC 2100
The Suncoast Freenet         The Things I Think
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