At 4:01 PM -0700 4/28/00, Eric Murray wrote:
>
>But I see the trend continuing, especially now that email marketing
>is in vogue... and by marketing here I do mean your list, or Declans's
>or Hettinga's or Schneier's. It's in your interest to make your list reach
>as far as possible, and mildly annoying a few people on the way
>isn't going to keep you from cross-posting it.
>
>It's a little sad, but inevitable.
It's more than sad: it's shitting all over mailing lists. And
shitting all over the future of mailing lists. When N people take M
articles from online sources, Yahoo, Lycos, Wired, Time, and then
cross-post them to every one of the lists they can think of, the
results are ugly.
We saw this a while back with someone who had several of his own
lists. We see this from Jean-Francois Avon, who isn't even subscribed
to the Cypherpunks list, and yet he copies gun-related news items to
our list and dozens of others. Here are the headers from one of his
recent spammings:
From: "Jean-Francois Avon" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Cypherpunks" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
"Tom Ashworth Prospector_s Cache" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
"Softwar" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, "QuackGrass.com" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
"Paul Richards' - Offshore Haven Newsletter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
"Patriot on Guard" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
"N. King at Standup New-Zealand" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
"[EMAIL PROTECTED]" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
"Dave in New-Zealand's freedom list" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
"Canada Protest Page" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
"American Patriot Friends Network" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
"Breitkreuz Hon. Gary MP" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
"Canadian Institute for Legislative Action" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
"Canadian Firearm Digest"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2000 00:42:17 -0500
Reply-To: "Jean-Francois Avon" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Old-Subject: Fwd: NEWS - UN Press Release on Small Arms Conference
Subject: Fwd: NEWS - UN Press Release on Small Arms Conference
>
>However, as usual, technical solutions work the best. Procmail is a
>great tool. It takes only a half-hour or so of reading to set up a working
>set of filters. The procmailex man page shows many examples, including
>one for filtering out duplicate messages from different mailing lists.
>It's also good for filtering out spam and cypherpunks posts from
>loons or with CDR: in the Subject.
I don't use Procmail, but the filters in Eudora Pro can do the same.
The problems are much more than just my spending some time filtering
out Avon, Gaylor, Hettinga, Bill Payne, etc.
The problems are implicit in the N people, M sources, to Z lists.
--Tim May
--
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
ComSec 3DES: 831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
"Cyphernomicon" | black markets, collapse of governments.
