[ale] OT: the Penny Black anti-spam proposal

[ChangingLINKS.com]

> Please explain to me how this works again with a mailing list.
> - Dave C.

It just dawned on me that I have a system very similar to the ale list in use 
at my site. I would *guess* that the site has more members than the ALE, and 
contact about the same number of people each day.
As new members sign up (or existing members implement spamarrest type 
solutions), I get a messages challenging me to verify that the email was not 
part of a bulk emailing. 

					Want to know what I do?
					I click the link and verify. 

Got one today in another language, and it was still easy. 
Now, I would *hate* to think that the ale list (coded and run by experts) 
would have less flexibility than my system (coded by me - someone who has 
refused to read a book on programming). I would hate to think that we have no 
one amoung us who could re-program the ale list some to allow for such 
verification. <obvious flamebait be a bigger man and ignore it>Worst casing 
it, we could each chip in a dollar and outsource the job to Russia. Hiring 
one today that has the brainbench C cert. amoung others (and 12 years 
programming experience) that would be perfect for the job.</bait>

I know our admins are volunteers, and do so out of the goodness of their 
hearts, but I would guess that they wouldn't mind filling out verifications - 
in the name of abolishing spam. 

The predictable response:
"We shouldn't have to change our system, spam should be stopped on their end."
"Right! Let's dig in our heels boys!" LOL

Coincidently, the local linux group is a bit more hip with their list, 
I signed up yesterday and today I got this message:

"the mailing list archives are back on-line.  They mangle email 
addresses on reciept, and are indexable by web robots.  Let me know if 
anyone has and problems.  I think I have the old archive data in them 
now as well.  It's going to take a while for procmail to sort through 
the 45MiB of mail archives and index them, but it's working on it."
-- 
Wishing you Happiness, Joy and Laughter,
Drew Brown
http://www.ChangingLINKS.com