My position on this, as the linux.* administrator: - addresses munging will make the gateway harder to use and will break by-author search with google (I believe that the archiving by google groups is one of the most important benefits of the gateway). I believe this to be important enough that munging cannot be justified by the minor improvements it provides. - Swen will not last forever, but munged addresses in archives will. - we do not know that the gateway is the source of addresses used by Swen, for all I know the infected users could be subscribed to debian lists. Actually, I would very surprised if a relevant number of the news servers used by Swen were still working (from a quick check, most are not). - most important of all: any serious email usage requires protection by an antivirus or a similar kind of filter. Using an unfiltered email address is negligent, and I can't see why we should care. - a couple of Swen-infected PC are more then enough to fill a typical unprotected mail account, so the debian lists hardly make the difference. - last but not least, I think it's politically wrong to break a widely used service because of some problem caused by windows users
About address munging in the debian archives: munging is useless, it does not protect from spammers. There are many other archives of the debian mailing lists, and our addresses end up on the web in many other places too. In the last years I verified that it's basically impossible to use an address and keep it out of web pages. My debian.org address has been on a little known web site for half a day and it was immediately harvested, and still receives spam. If we want to spend time fighting spam sent to the BTS we'd better look at implementing the use of DNSBL like CBL and DSBL, which would probably stop most of the spam the BTS gets these days. -- ciao, Marco
