On Sat, Feb 06, 1999 at 05:40:04AM -0800, Joe Rhett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > This whole mailing list situation is really silly. When Michael Elkins
> > ran the lists at Harvey Mudd College, they were open, and there was
> > practically no spam. The new maintainer has admitted that the reason
> > he closed the lists was not that there was a spam problem, but that he
> > thought that there might be. It is especially ridiculous because
> > mutt-dev is the address listed in "mutt -v" output as the address to
> > send bug reports to, but Mr. Kennedy, in my experience, has not always
> > bothered forwaring unapproved posts to the lists.
> >
> > 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.
>
> You don't buy insurance after the car crash, you buy it before. And if
> there are no crashes, you count yourself lucky.
Right, and since if it turns out to be a problem, we can immediately
close the list again, this is a completely silly analogy.
> > 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.
Did you _read_ the beginning of my post that you quoted above? I give
another really good reason or two for at least mutt-dev to be open. Or
are you just looking for an argument?
But I agree that it is a pain to have spam-filled lists, and if that
happens, I think it's reasonable to do something about it. I just think
that closing the lists, in this case, is not a particularly constructive
response. Someone's suggestion, for instance, of only having the list
accept posts with the list name as a to or cc address, sounds to me like
a good one. Whether majordomo can do that without major hacking,
though, is another question.
-Daniel
--
Daniel Eisenbud
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
