Hi all,
I sent what I thought was a very important request to one of the Fedora lists which was quickly beaten down, and I did not receive anything back on subsequent replies. I would appreciate your help in making sure that the lists are safe for all of us. I'm actually going to the trouble of subscribing to nearly all of the Red Hat mailing lists just to get the word out.
One thing that I have done recently was to search for my e-mail addresses on the Internet web pages to find all of the places that list them. Why bother doing this? Just like how Google has spiders that crawl the Internet to gather general information, spammers have spiders that crawl the Internet to gather e-mail addresses to spam people. I have contacted all of the websites who did not modify my e-mail addresses (mostly on mailing lists) in such that they cannot be collected. Red Hat has done at least one thing right in that they have modified everyone's e-mail address in their web archive, such that it reads something like <walrus bellsouth.net> for mine.
However Red Hat has left one big gaping whole that the spam spiders can still crawl into. There is a complete active mirror of these lists as postable newsgroups kept on a service called Gmane <http://gmane.org>. I'm using Gmane to write this message to you now. It's a pretty sophisticated setup, has safeguards to prevent spam getting posted, and they use Spam Assassin to clean up stuff that still ends up on the list (except you have to filter it yourself on the newsgroup interface). The only problem is that spam spiders crawl the newsgroups to collect e-mail addresses.
Gmane has a safeguard to prevent this, but it has to be turned on by the list administrator. Gmane can encrypt the e-mail addresses on the list such that any mail sent to them is routed through Gmane first, and then the sender must under go a challenge-response before the message gets routed to the actual recipient. Of all of the Red Hat lists I've only found two newsgroup mirrors that use address encryption: gmane.linux.redhat.fedora.java <fedora-java-list>, and gmane.redhat.taroon <taroon-beta-list>.
If you would like to see the Red Hat newsgroup mirrors have encrypted e-mail addresses, please reply to this topic and discuss. If you are even more brave (important since some of these lists are high-volume and not everything gets read), please contact your list administrator directly at <listname-admin@xxxxxxxxxx>. If someone knows how to get the word out on the international lists or to their administrators (since I don't speak multiple tongues), please do so. If someone knows who to contact who can make all of the newsgroups have encrypted e-mail addresses going above all of the list administrators (maybe the person who decided to obfuscate them all on the web archive?) please contact him or her and let us know how to contact that person.
Thanks so much, William
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