SPAM and archives (Was: Re: [plug] PHP question..)

[Onno Benschop]

On Thu, 2003-07-03 at 10:12, Kimberly Shelt wrote:
> Given my linmagau account is pretty splashed around the place
> and the old zip one isn't (or for that matter wasn't) it is an
> interesting thing.. and proves to me a good admin, who has a good
> hand on spam assassin et al, can really be a blessing :)

On Thu, 2003-07-03 at 10:30, Craig Ringer wrote: 
> No point in my worrying about spam-collecting behaviour now, I already 
> get 40+ spam a day. Mozilla spam filtering rocks.

Both these messages suggest that the solution is for me to filter SPAM.
While that requires even more of my resources apart from the stolen
bandwidth, I must very strongly disagree with these sentiments.

The solution is to stop SPAM in the first place.

While you may well argue that your email address is already "out there",
this is not a constructive means of resolving the problem. I agree that
you can not currently do much about existing lists, but you can try real
hard to not be added to any more lists. New SPAMmers are born each day.
Making their job harder is one way of making it less effective.

The problem is currently caused by email harvesters, which we can very
simply provide less addresses to by removing addresses from a
web-archive.

To top things off, a business that sells computers or burns CDs or sells
anything of interest to a huge group of dedicated Linux heads is well
advised to use the PLUG archive to do their harvesting. (Apart from the
escort services that are looking for a high percentage of male users.)

One solution for me may be that until this is resolved I break with
proper list protocol and only respond directly to individuals who ask a
question - this is bad in sooo many ways for our community.

I'm not happy and you should not be either. No-one should ever take
things for granted - they are the way they are because someone made it
so - there is no rule on the planet that says that you cannot improve
things in existence.

I'm CCing this message to the list manager and hope that this will
result in the archive being fixed.

I realise that I can simply not contribute anymore, or even unsubscribe,
but if I do that, I might as well just give up altogether.

Onno Benschop 

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