[118218] in Cypherpunks
Re: spam on the cypherpunks list
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Stewart)
Wed Sep 22 05:00:07 1999
Message-Id: <3.0.5.32.19990922013711.009c9100@idiom.com>
Date: Wed, 22 Sep 1999 01:37:11 -0700
To: cypherpunks@einstein.ssz.com
From: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>
In-Reply-To: <199909210457.XAA09643@einstein.ssz.com>
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Reply-To: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>
>Date: Tue, 21 Sep 1999 00:09:09 -0400
>From: Sean Kelly <sean.k@mindspring.com>
>Not to beat a dead horse, but is there some reason why this list is set up
>to forward mail from non list-members? I'd think that changing this would
>dramatically reduce the amount of junkmail on here.
Cypherpunks has a tradition of accepting posts from anybody -
after all, if we're advocating anonymity and pseudonymity,
we ought to deal with the consequences and build tools to deal with them.
Some messages from non-subscribers are spam; it annoys me too.
Some are variant spellings on the magic words to join or exit the list;
majordomo catches many such messages, but some get through.
It's valuable to get the occasional mail message from real people
who don't feel like receiving the whole cypherpunks firehose -
Some are newbies who saw our list address somewhere,
or old-timers who have day jobs that keep them busy.
Some people read the filtered cypherpunks lists that have existed from
time to time (I don't think any are active now, but there were a couple
best-5-10%-of-cypherpunks lists.)
Some people forward the list to newsgroups and read it with newsreaders,
so instead of "johndoe@foobar.edu" subscribing, it's "newsrelay@foobar.edu".
We could accommodate some of these people by pointing them to remailers;
it's easier now that there are web-based versions, though some
third-world networks are too slow for that.
Jim Choate's comments on the independence of the list servers are good.
On the other hand, he suggests that you can build a database of subscribers
by getting the lists from the other list servers. This doesn't work,
because some of them block access to those lists, either for privacy
or spam prevention or just-too-long-ness.
Thanks!
Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
