From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Sun Oct 24 06:05:01 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id ABC3E16A4CE for ; Sun, 24 Oct 2004 06:05:01 +0000 (GMT) Received: from dave.horsfall.org (mrdavi2.lnk.telstra.net [139.130.75.233]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6A88D43D31 for ; Sun, 24 Oct 2004 06:04:59 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from dave@horsfall.org) Received: from localhost (dave@localhost) by dave.horsfall.org (8.11.4/8.11.4) with ESMTP id i9O64uF05276 for ; Sun, 24 Oct 2004 16:04:57 +1000 (EST) Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2004 16:04:55 +1000 (EST) From: Dave Horsfall To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: <417B261B.2050201@yahoo.com> Message-ID: References: <20041015125113.G68950@mippet.ci.com.au> <20041015092119.GA93093@happy-idiot-talk.infracaninophile.co.uk> <417B261B.2050201@yahoo.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Subject: Re: Public FreeBSD lists vs. spammers and our private email addresses X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2004 06:05:01 -0000 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