Re: Address munging

Adam Sjøgren <[email protected]> wrote:
> Dmitry writes:
>> These include some pretty old and pretty alive mailing lists, which have paradoxically been hanging in a state that is worse than being completely absent from Gmane.
>
> Except that you can't reply directly to authors

List addresses are affected as well, do not they?

> the groups are perfectly usable, right?

By posting via Gmane NNTP gateway, you mean?

Unless you are (1) use a domain name you control for your mail address and (2) either (a) old-fashioned enough to configure you mail server not to sign outgoing mail or (b) tech-savvy enough to implement client-side DKIM for your NNTP client (I am not aware of any, that have that feature out of a box), whatever you post will systematically tend to end up in junk folders of subscribers, if not rejected outright.

I believe, you are aware of that sma-all refinement of ‘perfectly usable’, since you yourself seem to belong to the category 2b, do not you? :-).


>> is there any reason, why this (mis)feature still exist at all?
>
> I believe it was because of worries that spammers would be harvesting email-addresses in a central place.

It was, sure.  But is it still a relevant worry?

Do I recall correctly, that due to the very same concern even bodies of messages was munged once, but finally that have been lifted?

> Some mailing lists would say no to Gmane carrying their list without the encryption.

> If the mailing list owner has agreed to have the list on Gmane on the basis of encryption being on, it would be rude of Gmane to just turn it off, right?

That is, there are such lists?  If yes, then, of course, a suggestion to deprecate obscurificator entirely is way too radical.

However, many (most?) of groups in question are processed for the reasons that for sure have nothing to do with the wishes of their listmasters, since they are publicly archived elsewhere, and first of all at the place of their origin.

E. g., full and uncrippled archives of gnu.org, nongnu.org and libreplanet.org are easily available via HTTP at [1], yet, for example, [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected] are affected.

I guess, theyʼd picked up a ‘conceal addresses’ flag only because few years ago a subscription form featured it turned on by default, and whoever had sent an archival request had not been sagacious enough to turn it off.

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/mbox/

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