At 05:40 AM 2/6/99 -0800, Joe Rhett wrote:
>> Given that there is no current reason to have mutt-* closed,
>
>Sure there is. I'm on 3 open lists (to my regret), and I get no less than
>12 pieces of spam per day from each of them. On most of them (like gnuplot),
>the content to spam ratio is pretty damn low. Once people figure out that the
>list is open, it will end up on every spammer's bomb list. It gets old real
>quick.
The procmail list is open (for similar reasons; the procmail man page
points to it), yet it only gets maybe one piece of spam per month.
How? It only accepts posts that have the list address in the To: or Cc:
header. Nearly all spam doesn't do that, you may have noticed, because
it would slow down the flow of sludge by requiring small individual mailings
(since it's easy to autotrash messages with zillions of visible recipients).
So posters can't Bcc the procmail list any more... none are complaining
about that.
>You don't buy insurance after the car crash, you buy it before. And if
>there are no crashes, you count yourself lucky.
Not in this case. This door *could* be closed again if spam does start
showing up. The list address is already out in the world, and that
isn't changed by restricting who's allowed to post.
>> and several good reasons against it, could we _please_ open them?
>
>And what may that be? So that people with many mail addresses don't have to
>fix their Froms? Be serious.
It might be nice if perhaps something like LISTSERV(tm)'s NOMAIL option
were available... a subscribed address, but no mail gets sent to it
(except perhaps a renewal confirmation if nothing comes from it for
6 months or a year).
Only peripherally related: I wish the unsubscribe-after-bounce on the mutt
lists wasn't quite so hairtrigger... I was unsubscribed several times a
month or two ago when my ISP was having troubles; other lists which had
some bounce thresholds didn't remove me.
Cheers,
Stan
