Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2004 16:04:55 +1000 (EST) From: Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Public FreeBSD lists vs. spammers and our private email addresses Message-ID: <Pine.BSI.4.61.0410241555030.4807@dave.horsfall.org> In-Reply-To: <417B261B.2050201@yahoo.com> References: <20041015125113.G68950@mippet.ci.com.au> <20041015092119.GA93093@happy-idiot-talk.infracaninophile.co.uk> <Pine.BSI.4.58.0410162126550.854@dave.horsfall.org> <417B261B.2050201@yahoo.com>
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On Sun, 24 Oct 2004, Rob wrote: > 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). So it's already filtered? OK, I guess I'll stay :-) > 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. That is indeed a *huge* problem, and should be addressed. > 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. And these are the ones who will tell their friends: "I tried FreeBSD, and since then I've got all this spam!" Not good for the cause. And in case anyone's wondering, I block by source, not by content. > 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. Trivial to do; just replace "@" with something that a machine cannot easily parse. -- Dave
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