<quote who="Peter Rundle">

> > Participation in a list like that would be fun as a social experiment or
> > research project but terrible for building and maintaining a vibrant
> > community. No thanks!
> 
> A statement but where's the supporting argument. What is in fact so bad
> about a list whereby the senders e-mail is not automatically disclosed by
> the mailing software?

Note that what you're proposing isn't just "remove the sender's address"...
It's "strip the entire incoming email of any identifying strings", which is
quite a different thing. If we just wanted to drop the From: email address,
we could turn on reply-to munging (but that topic has been beaten to death
many times before, let's not even start).

> Do you really claim to be an expert on social behaviour that you know this
> will cause people to drop out of the community?

No, but I think a brief consideration of my experience in online communities
and a bit of common sense would help alleviate your concerns, and this point
of view has already been supported by other posters. Munging incoming mails
so viciously would make the list vastly less pleasant, and much less open to
socialising and community building. The small (though increasing) amount of
SPAM we get simply doesn't justify the cost. Subscriber-only posting, though
a total bummer, would get rid of the current chunk of SPAM on the list. That
is a simple solution to that side of the problem. I think you are making too
much of the potential link between your participation on this list and the
personal SPAM you are receiving, so I'm not really addressing that concern.

> Essentially I'm advocating the poster can choose (rather than the list
> admin), how hard they want to make it for people to reply.

Unfortunately, reply-to munging does exactly the opposite!


Please don't act so surprised that you received a blunt reply from me. You
knew precisely what you were getting into when you posted such an outrageous
over-reaction to the minor (though slowly worsening) SPAM situation. :-)

- Jeff

-- 
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