Re: New list, what about lukers?

[Enno Rehling <enno@...>]

Pedro wrote:

> In principle I'd agree, of course. But I suppose there's the matter of 
> automated email-collecting bots used by spammers and the like. This way, the 
> admins are protecting our mailboxes.

By not making the list public, you invite lots of newbies to ask questions 
first, read archives later. I answered a lot of my questions with google 
before I ever posted to the list.

> This being the case, of course, I do agree that there should be a way of not 
> getting emails. I wonder whether Mailman can do that.

You can tell mailman to not print the mails in cleartext. But of course, 
spam harvesters will at somepoint fingure out how to read enno [at] 
somewhere [dot] com, and it's not going to help that much. But spam isn't 
going to go away, and sooner or later, every email you use publicly will end 
up on a list and spread from there.

Also, if the mailng list continues to be mirrored at gmane.org (I sincerely 
hope so, since that's how I read it), then any spam harvester can just grab 
the email addresses from there.

I can highly recommend the (free) services of http://www.despammed.com/ by 
the way. They give me an email address with very agressive filtering, which 
I use for most of my mailing list / usenet traffic. They filter incoming 
mail, and forward what's not spam to your real address - great if you don't 
want to set up spamassassin yourself.

Enno.