On Thursday March 20 2008 14:54:58 Paul Johnson wrote:
On Thursday 20 March 2008 01:11:45 am L. Rahyen wrote:
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.