Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2004 12:48:43 +0900 From: Rob <spamrefuse@yahoo.com> To: FreeBSD <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Public FreeBSD lists vs. spammers and our private email addresses Message-ID: <417B261B.2050201@yahoo.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSI.4.61.0410241237520.4807@dave.horsfall.org> References: <20041015125113.G68950@mippet.ci.com.au> <20041015092119.GA93093@happy-idiot-talk.infracaninophile.co.uk> <Pine.BSI.4.58.0410162126550.854@dave.horsfall.org> <Pine.BSI.4.61.0410241237520.4807@dave.horsfall.org>
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Dave Horsfall wrote: > On Sat, 16 Oct 2004, Dave Horsfall wrote: > > [ Anyone can post to -questions ] > > >>Gawd; I hope it's moderated in that case... > > > And several spams later, received via this very list... > > So, is this list a spam-magnet i.e any spammer can post to it without > fear? If so, not only have you just lost me as a potential contributor, > but it's going to get listed as such. There is *no* excuse for running an > open mailing list any more. I think spamfilters are doing already a good job here; spam that makes it through to the lists, seems to be fairly small. In addition, I believe it's the policy of the list maintainers, to keep the thresshold as low as possible for participation in the Q&A. You can avoid subscription by following the newsgroup instead (e.g. on gmane). However, there's a more serious problem: all emails to the FreeBSD lists are propagated to public newsgroups and archives with the original (private) email addresses unmodified. Since the newsgroups and archives are public, it's a great source of email addresses for spammers. Especially innocent people, who just want to ask a question, will suffer, since they may realize too late (if not even never realizing at all!) that the lists are actually advertising their private email addresses on the public newsgroups and archives. It would be much better if propagation to the newsgroups and archives would scramble the private email addresses, to make such lists unusable for collectors of email addresses for sending spam. Rob.
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