-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Jan 24, 2008, at 6:31 PM, Allan Hansen wrote:
> I agree, and it's not harsh enough. > > My first reaction to this was Oh-My-God. > > My second reaction was to think that we needed an agreement among > Mailman list users that Mailman not be used for spam. Then I > realized that that would only inconvenience legit Mailman users and > spammers would not care to lie, just as they don't care about how > grievously they inconvenience and lie to everyone on their 1,000,000 > long subscriber lists. > > So I suppose that the best response is to simply ignore requests > such as this which so obviously is from a spammer. Let me chime in for just a second. Without really knowing the details of this specific case, I should point out a few things. First, as anybody who's seen my replybot message knows, I consider spammers reprehensible and am saddened whenever I see them using Mailman for their nefarious purposes. Fortunately, I'm always gladdened in more than equal measure by all the great people using Mailman for positive, fun, interesting, and socially important ways. Second, because GNU Mailman is licensed under the GPL, we cannot legally restrict Mailman from being used for any purpose. The GPL is copyright based -- there's no user agreement anywhere to be found. I sometimes wish we could legally prevent spammers from using Mailman, but we cannot, and in fact I think in the long run, that benefits all of us. Spamming activities certainly run afoul of other, better laws, and I'd rather err on the side of more freedom than less. However, I think it's perfectly appropriate to denounce spammers, and refuse to help them. I hope we can also educate them so that people who might be inadvertently or naively spamming people will come to understand that there is a better way. Some people know exactly what they are doing and don't care. Those people deserve our scorn. But I also know of cases where people really didn't realize that what they were doing was unacceptable or possibly illegal. Let's help them understand they can use tools like Mailman in a more acceptable way. If they still want to do bad things, we don't have to help them. Cheers, - -Barry -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (Darwin) iD8DBQFHmTN52YZpQepbvXERApQDAJ0cGV1m1I7IivTByefoUFtkJNsjRwCgidI5 caJZHBj4yX73gRarLoyYUeI= =k89P -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ------------------------------------------------------ Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq01.027.htp
