Re: gnu-emacs-help news->mail gateway

[Tim Cross]

On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 4:14 AM, Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:
>> From: Sivaram Neelakantan <address@hidden>
>> Date: Tue, 11 Oct 2011 20:08:12 +0530
>>
>> I'd second that part about receiving spam directly.  My stats mailing
>> list email id receives boatloads of spam....
>
> GNU mailing lists have zero spam for a long time now.
>
>

Still misses the point. With mail lists, you MUST provide a legitimate
email address. It is irrelevant whether the lists you subscribes to
gets spam or whether its spam filter is good enough to filter spam
out. You don't  know for certain if people subscribed to that mail
list are not getting spam directly to their inbox i.e. not via the
mail list, but directly to the address they used in subscribing to the
list.

This is the big difference between mail list based collaboration and
newgroups or web forums. With the latter, you don't need to provide a
mail address.

On the whole, the GNU mail lists are very well administered and do not
suffer the configuration issues of many other mail lists where address
harvesting is made very easy. On the other hand, GNU servers do appear
to be targets and have been compromised in the past, so we cannot
guarantee the email addresses that were provided have not been
harvested and added to a spam list somewhere.

As I stated originally, I do see this change as being largely
inevitable, but it is just not true that mail lists are an equivalent
alternative. Some features are lost. The extent to which an individual
may care about that will vary.

Tim

-- 
Tim Cross