List spam

[Alain Ketterlin]

gene heskett <gheskett at wdtv.com> writes:

>> Or save work and find a public nntp server (or setup one, or ask your
>> provider), and use a news reader to follow the list (even thunderbird
>> can do this). No spam, no need to store messages on your machine,
>> auto-purge after a configurable delay, etc.

> That is asking the user to take considerable effort and resources to do 
> that.  What is wrong with the mailing list only approach?

Nothing really.

Regarding effort and resources, once you've found a NNTP server there's
very little effort (probably less than subscribing to a mailing list). I
have 4 lines in my .emacs. And this lets me browse dozens of groups (or
thousands if I had time for this). It might not be easy to find a server
which will let you post, but that's because a few years back many
internet providers decided that nntp was too much traffic. I guess it
would now be considered ridiculous compared to the average web-site.

But I'd like to return the question. What's wrong with nntp? It looks
like everybody agrees that nntp brings spam. I just wanted to say that's
not true, I use nntp extensively and haven't seen spam for months (I'm
talking about 15-20 groups, not comp.lang.python only).

The real problem here seems to be google groups, which in some way
forwards spam to the mailing-list. How this happens is beyond my
understanding. But let's try to fix the real problem.

-- Alain.