Le mercredi 26 février 2020, 03:58:40 CET Mike Gerwitz a écrit : > On Tue, Feb 25, 2020 at 14:07:42 +0000, Mancini, Sabin (DFS) wrote: > > Mike, > > What about using bcc to prevent "scraping" email addresses ? > > All mail sent to the list would have to be hidden behind fake addresses > generated by the mailing list. I'm not sure what the capabilities of > Mailman are, but would cause breakages in many other ways for people. > > What is being done is unacceptable, but I don't want one bad actor to > cause drastic changes.
The most important thing: with a *mailing-list*, it is *not* possible to impede scraping of mail addresses from subscribers. This is by virtue of *definition*. If it were so, it would not anymore be a *mailing* list, but something else. A mailing-list is some way of getting *mails* from *other* people you don’t know. It allows to hide to everybody the addresses of people not participating yet subscribed, but it is a *feature* of it that anyone within the mailing-list can get the mail address of anyone participating to the discussion, and bring that to another list, privately, publicly again, etc. This is a very consequence from the fact mail is a federated protocol (and was the first). If you do federation but hide the federated address, the “@” and what’s before and/or after it, it’s not federated anymore. You’ve just successfully made yet another opaque centralized communication platform. You can’t anymore claim it’s federated or open. And yes, when it’s decentralized, horizontal, policing is harder, it’s intended to be so. This is like seeing a free software be used for something you don’t like, and say “hey, I love free software, but here my awesome idea: what if we kept it free-software, but prevented certain uses, studies, modifications or shares of it?”, just no…
