[ILUG] Hmm - old ilug site?

[adam beecher]

> Without wishing to offend you or anyone else, I really don't care.
>
Lovely. It's heartening to hear that the administrator of linux.ie doesn't give
a shite about the users that populate it.

> Spam is basically a fact of life; anyone who's active on the Net will
> eventually get it by one vector or another, and obfuscating addresses on
> a mail archive site isn't going to make any significant difference.  I'm
> also of the opinion that address obfuscation in general is a Bad Thing,
> making life Just That Bit More Difficult for everyone without actually
> having much of an effect on spam.  Spam can be, and should be, dealt
> with at the receiving end rather than at the source end - using RBL and
> some sensible procmail filters can make a huge difference; and in any
> case it's not hard to just ignore it.  However, you can't hide your
> email address for ever.
>
If you can tell me a way of filtering my mail before it's downloaded from a POP
account on a mail server I have no access to, I'd love to hear about it. Maybe
there is, I don't know. In the meantime, I have to download those messages over
my itty-bitty 56k line before I filter them, which entirely defeats the purpose.
My bandwidth, limited as it is, is important to me. My phone bill is already
loony-toons. You've heard these arguments before, in relation to the Reply-to
address munging - they still stand.

Again, I can't be sure that the pipermail archives are the source of the spam I
receive, but once again, it's a hole that should be blocked to negate the chance
of it ever happening. Also, obfuscating email addresses in the manner I
suggested - passing the address off to a script that will either create a form
or send a "Location: mailto:" header - would have absolutely no negative affect
on the server or the user. It would simply block - for a time at least - the
spambots.

> If you're *horribly* concerned, I suggest something like subscribing to
> the ILUG using a particular address, and blocking all mail to that
> address which doesn't contain one or other of the ILUG-specific
> headers.  Two lines of procmail should do nicely.
>
Which is what I'll do. But I shouldn't have to do it - the same as I shouldn't
get replies from the list twice, because an outdated document on the web says
it's a Bad Thing.

> Walk a mile on these feet and tell me that.  The only way I can
> *possibly* cope with keeping all my servers (including the linux.ie
> web/mail server) alive and healthy is by not introducing my own patches
> and deviations from the standard 'what comes with Debian' packages.  The
> system as it stands does everything it's supposed to do, but to be
> perfectly honest I don't have the time to introduce features (especially
> features with which I have a Problem - see above) to satisfy the
> hobby-horses of anyone in particular.
>
I think "hobby-horse" is just plain silly - this is as much about the other
users on the list as it is about me. But once again you come off as a martyr to
the linux.ie cause Colm, and I honestly can't understand that. If administering
linux.ie is really all that much trouble for you, why do you do it? I'm sure
there are others out there who would do it without being half as snotty to
someone for suggesting that the email addresses of linux.ie users be protected.

A little politeness wouldn't go astray.

adam