Previous Politech message: http://www.politechbot.com/p-05044.html --- To: declanat_private, gnuat_private Subject: Re: FC: Politech back from hiatus, and important list news Date: Mon, 08 Sep 2003 16:47:04 -0700 From: John Gilmore <gnuat_private> I've seen a bunch of lists move back and forth between Majordomo and Mailman. My suggestion is to stick with what you know. There seems to be no compelling advantage, particularly over the long term. > Fifth, I have to figure out how to spam-proof the archives. Thanks to those > folks who responded a month or two ago (including Earl Hood, the estimable > author of mhonarc, which is the utility that builds the Politech web site). > A newer version of mhonarc includes email address obfuscation, and I can > write a Perl script to obfuscate the rest. Why have you fallen into the all-too-common fallacy of thinking that if email addresses aren't published anywhere, that will help "solve" the problem of unwanted communications? I had an idiot come after me several times, demanding that my archive of the USENIX Face Saver images remove his email address, because he was trying to obliterate every reference to it on the web. I refused, of course. Have we reached a Brave New World in which we all start rewriting online history to suit today's prejudices? That sounds like what you propose for the Politech archives. For the record, please keep my email address INTACT in the Politech archives. I don't want my communications to be "obfuscated" in the historical record. Unwanted communications would exist even if every "spammer" was flayed and burned at the stake. You should know -- reporters get more unwanted press releases than anybody. The only viable solution is for the recipient to filter their incoming email. It's the only viable solution because only the recipient knows what they are interested in. The anti-"spam" crowd seems to think that there is a category of communications that NOBODY is interested in, and that therefore should be suppressed. That is obviously false with regard to commercial spam, or the "spammers" would not persist in sending it, since they wouldn't make any money from it. Since some people ARE interested in it, it's our job (if we choose to accept it) to create a cheaper way for senders to reach those people -- cheaper than sending a copy to all of us as well as the recipients who desire it. We cannot compel people to stop communicating, unless we break the basic foundations of our free society. Good luck at finding a cheaper way; my efforts are going into reducing the cost to recipients of unwanted communications, rather than the cost to senders. (There may be religious or political unwanted communications that indeed NOBODY is interested in; these would also be solved by reducing recipient costs to near-zero.) > Sixth, because of the deadly combination of spam and viral spam, I'm not > sure how long I'll be able to keep the declanat_private address. I estimate > I've received over 10,000 spam/viral spam messages in the last month. I Is that all? :-) The design goal of grokmail is to handle 10,000:1 noise-to-signal ratio; that is, to be pleasant to use if you got 1 interesting message and 10,000 uninteresting ones in a day. Whether we reach that goal remains to be seen. Today it is not even stable enough that I recommend its use by anyone but me (its internal database gets too easily corrupted, requiring a reloading that takes days). The viruses themselves are trivial to filter out. I suspect that the load from bounced virus forgeries that use your from-address will go down rapidlyu; and at any case they're easy to filter out too. Leaving these aside, what's your issue about spam -- has the rest of the spam suddenly gotten worse? 10,000 messages a month is only about 330 a day; not an unusual load for someone who gets more than a hundred INTERESTING messages a day, such as yourself. John PS: gnuat_private has been a working and active email address for a LONG time, since before ordinary people could get on the Internet. I don't plan to give it up. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ Like Politech? Make a donation here: http://www.politechbot.com/donate/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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