On Thursday March 20 2008 14:54:58 Paul Johnson wrote: > On Thursday 20 March 2008 01:11:45 am L. Rahyen wrote: > > > Address munging is considered harmful. It's the postmaster's > > > responsibility not to accept spam in the first place. > > > http://www.interhack.net/pubs/munging-harmful/ > > > > I disagree with this article. I lost enough mail addresses in the past > > when tried to use them "as is" without paying attention on how well they > > munged in the archives or public web-pages; when I started to use my new > > address only in limited number of "trusted" public places (and always > > check how well it is munged in these "trusted" public places) the problem > > was "magically" solved. > > There's no such thing as losing an email address to spammers, unless you're > doing something truly stupid like using easy passwords so they can hijack > your account. Spammers don't need passwords. They need the user attention! If I have address that receives dozens or more spam messages per day I consider it "destroyed". I don't have a time to filter spam messages by hand and didn't found really effective way to filter them automatically without possibility to lose legitimate messages yet. > There's plenty of tools to deal with the spam problem the > right way, there's really no legitimate excuse to deal with it the lazy, > ineffectual way. Just let's remember recent spam assault in wine-users. How many users was able to filter out this spam messages automatically? Almost nobody I guess. This suggests that most users at this list don't know about perfect (or near-perfect) solution how to automatically distinguish between spam and legitimate messages and I think that it doesn't exist yet. BTW, my current way of dealing with spam is very efficient in practice. For my e-mail I receive few spam messages per week. For e-mail addresses that was published in some *popular* places without munging I receive up to hundreds of spam messages per day (so I just disabled these addresses because of this). Anyway, this becomes offtopic discussion (not related to WINE or its forum/ML). So let's discuss this farther offlist; I sent you a messages with more detailed answers/questions privately. Thank you. * * * Originally my answer to this topic was about that users of the forum have an option to hide their e-mail (make it non-public) and maybe they don't want it to be available for everyone (BTW, all addresses will be munged by public e-mail archives automatically). One reason for this is that they probably don't expect to receive answers via e-mail and this is what most likely to happen because many of us use reply-to-all button in MLs. This is true even if (forum) user decided to not hide his/her e-mail in the forum settings. This is mostly privacy-related question. So if we decide to post their address there should be big fat warning in the setting of the forum about this. But I consider posting their address in "From:" field as very bad idea because of above reason. And I don't see reasons where disclosement of e-mail address of forum users would be actually useful for other people who are using ML.
