[meta-sig] Switchover to mailman

[Guido van Rossum]

Ken writes:
> The thing i'm weighing here is usefulness of the feature - i think those
> things above are significant for building a community, as well as for
> individual purposes - versus potential nuisance.  It does seem to me
> that the *option* to inhibit visibility should be enough for people that
> object to having their names spider-visible.  This would suggest that
> it's ok to make visibility the default setting, but do a bit more to
> point out the visibility, and how to change it, in the list welcome
> messages, for those that would be concerned.  However, i could be
> convinced that the visibility is just too open, somehow.  I think this
> discussion is helpful - but i certainly think there are valid reasons
> for having the list membership available, the question is how available.

Let me reiterate.  I want my name to be visible and I want *people* to
be able to find out my email (even in a quick cut-and-paste-able way)
but I want to put up something in the way of crawlers that are
specifically out there to grab email addresses.

Therefore, making myself invisible is not an option, but I still want
spam protection.

My assumption is that spam crawlers are looking for pages containing
lots of easily parsable email addresses (recognizable by either
mailto: or just the '@' sign) and will not bother to craw the entire
web -- too expensive -- nor will they bother to write bots that do
intelligent searching for "hidden" email addresses.  They will use
other web crawlers to find publicly available mailing lists though.

The Findmail solution is the right way to go, I think.  See

http://www.findmail.com/listsaver/thread-sig/mailto.html?mid=1580457941&num=147

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)