Re: Mailing list status - privacy?

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

General comment on the subject: 

While my general feeling is that "the spammers are going to get your email
address, hiding is not a solution", I do appreciate the concern.

I can change the archiver to mangle the addresses to some degree or another.
I'm not really sure how far to go with this. The only sure form of mangling
is to mangle far enough that a human can't decipher them. This is what
geocrawler and egroups do. But I think this makes the archives much
less useful.

Much weaker mangling is done my sourceware.cygnus.com - the mangling is
easily reversable and only addresses in the headers are mangled, not
other addresses in the body. 

 (See, e.g. http://sourceware.cygnus.com/ml/java-discuss/2000-05/msg00085.html)

But I'm not sure that level of mangling is going to do much good at
foiling spambots.

Matthew <matthew@mattshouse.com> writes:

> >  Matthew if you are reading this, could you tell our list admins where the
> >setting is?
> 
> I assume that they are reading the list?
> 
> I use Mailman for all of my lists.  I will use my domain as the example.  The
> list is based at cvs.orasoft.org, and the name of the list that I will use for
> the example is orauser.
> 
> The base URL for administration is:
> http://cvs.orasoft.org/mailman/admin/orauser
> 
> To switch from displaying actual e-mail addresses to masked addresses go to:
> http://cvs.orasoft.org/mailman/admin/orauser/privacy
> and change the option:
> Show member addrs so they're not directly recognizable as email addrs?
> 
> To make the addresses viewable by admins or list members change the value of:
> Who can view subscription list?
> 
> to the appropriate setting.  It's all very easy with the browser-based
> administration that comes with Mailman.

I think we are discussing different sets of email addresses. The
setting you describe is for the subscriber lists, which I've set not
to be viewable at all for the gnome.org lists. I don't think it
applies to the mailing list archives. (While I haven't tried setting
this setting, I did read over the archiving code, and didn't see any
handling of this.)
 
> While you're changing options, you should configure it to send replies to the
> list instead of the recipient.  This list is low-traffic enough that it would
> not be a nuisance.

My take on this is described by the name of the Gnus flag that you have
to turn on to deal with lists configured in this way: broken-reply-to.

Setting the reply-to to go to the list means that with some mailers
(Gnus is not one of them), it is very hard to make a reply that goes
to the person, not to the list.

Of course, this is one of the classic internet debates; so if you have
a differing opinion on the subject, please mail me, not the list. :-)

Regards,
                                        Owen