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Gerald Oskoboiny | 11 Sep 04:40

email address obfuscation considered harmful

One thing I really liked about this list when I joined was its
policy on email address munging:

    This list does not munge addresses. If you don't like that, don't
    post. Real elitists make spammers disappear for everyone; they
    don't hide from spammers. People who ask their addresses to be
    removed from the list archives will be publicly mocked. At
    Management's sole discretion, addresses of persons asking to be
    removed from the list archives may also be added to popular,
    frequently crawled pages on this or other sites.
    -- http://web.archive.org/web/20030811175517/http://zgp.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-elitists

I'm disappointed to see that not only has my favorite sentence
("Real elitists...") been removed from the current listinfo page,
but the archives now munge addresses to "gerald at impressive.net"

When did it become time to start hiding from spammers?

I just posted an entry on W3C's systems blog about the (lack of)
obfuscation in our mailing list archives, feedback welcome:
http://www.w3.org/blog/systeam/2008/09/11/email_address_obfuscation
(here or there, or both)

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-- 
Gerald Oskoboiny <gerald <at> impressive.net>
http://impressive.net/people/gerald/
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Ben Finney | 11 Sep 06:52

Re: email address obfuscation considered harmful

Gerald Oskoboiny <gerald <at> impressive.net> writes:

> I'm disappointed to see that not only has my favorite sentence
> ("Real elitists...") been removed from the current listinfo page,
> but the archives now munge addresses to "gerald at impressive.net"

Which, if nothing else, is contrary to what the listinfo page
currently promises:

    No munging: […] When you post, your address should appear, without
    munging, in the list archives. Requests to munge addresses in the
    archive will be silently dropped or publicly mocked, depending on
    their entertainment value.

> I just posted an entry on W3C's systems blog about the (lack of)
> obfuscation in our mailing list archives, feedback welcome:
> http://www.w3.org/blog/systeam/2008/09/11/email_address_obfuscation
> (here or there, or both)

Would it be churlish of me to point out that real elitists use OpenID
relying parties on their weblogs, instead of requesting "Name, Email,
Site" over and over again? Very well, then I am churlish.

--

-- 
 \         “I got up the other day, and everything in my apartment has |
  `\   been stolen and replaced with an exact replica.” —Steven Wright |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney

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Don Marti | 11 Sep 16:40

Re: email address obfuscation considered harmful

begin Ben Finney quotation of Thu, Sep 11, 2008 at 02:52:09PM +1000:
> Gerald Oskoboiny <gerald <at> impressive.net> writes:
> 
> > I'm disappointed to see that not only has my favorite sentence
> > ("Real elitists...") been removed from the current listinfo page,
> > but the archives now munge addresses to "gerald at impressive.net"
> 
> Which, if nothing else, is contrary to what the listinfo page
> currently promises:

Configuration error.  This option does not
seem to be in the Mailman web config forms,
but it looks like ARCHIVER_OBSCURES_EMAILADDRS in
/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/Defaults.py should fix it.
Will see how this message comes through, and if it
works I'll rebuild the archives.

--

-- 
Don Marti                                               +1 510-814-0932
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/
dmarti <at> zgp.org         Linux device driver unconference: http://freedomhec.org/
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Gmane