[Linux-aus] Spam Happens

[David Lloyd]

Daniel,

> The statement that was made, IIRC, was that they wanted people to be
> able to post questions, et al, to the list without needing to be on
> it, which is definitely a fair position to take.

It is a fair position to take but it's difficult to justify it when I
believe most postings from "non-members" have been spam. I'm wondering
if it is easy to correlate spam e-mails from non-members and spam
e-mails from members. Also a useful correlation would be postings from
"non-members" which are indeed relevant questions.

Could I make the point that I often see things like "Oh, please CC me
beause I'm not on the list"? I find this irritating. Personally I think
it's a little rude to expect people to help you but not actually be in a
position to help others [it's difficult to help people on
freebsd-questions if you rarely see freebsd-question posts for example].
More importantly the person who posts often doesn't get a reply which
makes the whole list and whatever it represents look bad.

Whether one likes it or not, it is really easy to forget to CC the
unfortunate non-list member...

> I'm a subscriber who endorses posting by non-members, and there are
> also other subscribers who endorse this. As to the committee tag, I
> often tag myself as a LUV committee member when replying to LUV stuff
> that involves the committee, and add that it's only my personal view,
> not that of the entire committee, if I'm not sure of the other
> members' positions. I think it's quite a fair thing to do.

I tend to subscribe to cabinet solidarity as far as committees are
concerned. I think that you are indeed fair but that doesn't mean others
will be fair if they want to have a dispute with you about you being
fair.

> No, it's more a case of the pros outweighing the cons. Effective
> software to stop spam is available.

I'd offer to seek the advice of others off list, put together a paper
and submit that to the Linux Australia committee for consideration. The
paper would revolve around how to stop spam on an open-for-all mailing
list. It sounds like Jeff Waugh knows a little or a lot about this so he
may already have some easily installed, server-side solutions to the
problem.

> Spam is here. It's going to get to you one way or another. I abhor it,
> but nothing's really going to stop it.

What a defeatist attitude? How about saying "I don't believe I can do
more to stop it". I believe that we can and that there are ways to work
around this little conundrum.


DSL