[Mailman-Developers] Interesting study -- spam on postedaddresses...

[Dale Newfield]

On Fri, 22 Feb 2002, John Morton wrote:
> The problem is that if you accept that those nefarious agents of mass
> email will start auto-joining lists and plunder the private archive and
> message feed for addresses sometime in the future, then you have to
> implement another layer of hackery to detect and block that sort of
> thing. Does that make your suggestion any less of an actual solution?
> :-)

As was already pointed out, if the spambots get smart enough to subscribe,
they don't need the archives--they just have to wait for the addresses to
appear in their mailboxes.  So once they've cleared that hurdle, nothing
you do to the archives will help one bit.

> I'd still go as far as adding per user configurability for address
> display so people can adjust the option to suit there own level of
> hysteria.

That adds tremendous management headaches for both users and admins, as
well as difficult coding problems (since whenever one subscriber quotes
another you need to figure that out and do multiple "how should I
obfuscate YOUR email adress?" lookups).  Why not just ignore this
non-solution and save everyone the headaches?

-Dale