Dave writes: | On Wed, Aug 14, 2002 at 06:36:17PM -0700, Toby Rider wrote: | > They're probably subscribed to the abcusers list. Since you are a | > list subscriber, you can send majordomo a "who" command, and go through the | > entire list of abcuser subscribers, find any email addresses that look | > suspect. Then you can send them an email demanding to know if they are | > the bot they automatically archives the lists. | ... | Describing mail-archive.com as "filth" when they provide a useful, free, | public service is a little OTT in my opinion; but then I feel that | posting to a public list is tantamount to giving away your email address | anyway.
Generally true. They seem to have done a bit of obscuring of email addresses, but not all that much. Of course, for a mailing list to be useful, the members do generally want to send email to each other directly. Some replies are best sent to the list, while others are best sent to an individual. There's really no logical way out of this. We might note that this sort of archive is generally less of a problem than the growing "harvesting" of addresses that commercial ISPs and "backbone" sites are doing. In other fora, there has been a fair amount of discussion of the fact that some of the big guys (especially msn and yahoo) consider all traffic going through their machines to be their property. There was a bit of a fuss a year or so back when people found that msn.com was extracting things like images from email and using them in ads. Recently, yahoo decided without any notification that their email lists were sellable unless users "opted out" by using a web page that wasn't publicised and couldn't be found by searching their email signup pages. If your email address is known to msn/hotmail or yahoo, you should expect that your address has been sold to spammers. But the case that Jack found probably wasn't like this; it was probably spammers discovering the mail-archive site and extracting addresses from the mail headers. We oughta be, uh, "discussing" this with them. It does appear that they are at least somewhat aware of the problem. If we discuss it reasonably, there's a chance that they will do more to hide email addresses. But this is inherently something that can't be done completely without killing what is after all a rather valuable net resource. BTW, there is a lot of precedent for mailing lists policing their membership lists. This was started back in the 80's, by a number of technical lists on biological topics. Any list with open membership found themselves under serious assault by creationists, who would flood the list with flame wars. The only solution was strict controls on who could join the list, and rapid eviction of any member submitted creationist flames. There was also the group in Turkey that scanned lists and newsgroups for any mention of terms like "Kurd" or "Israel" and flooded the lists with inflammatory political tracts. This was solved only by some rather strong countermeasures that identified the (rapidly changing) sources of such messages and deleted them. The current topic isn't this extreme. But it is reasonable to discuss whether we want to allow this list to be archived in a public fashion, and if not, how we evict abusers. I'd think that it's of benefit to the abc user community to permit fairly open enrollment in abcusers. Perhaps what we really need is occasional notice that this is a *very* open list, and members should expect that their email address is very exposed. (Perhaps we could also solve the problem by sending form letters to spammers pointing out that we are musicians, so most of us probably don't have enough money to be worth their attention. ;-) To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
