Gibberish spams

[dane]

Is it really a good idea to include the real E-Mail address of others, who probably appreciated receiving it as much as you did, in an open spam report on a web page, so that their E-Mail addresses can be further harvested?

I would think the right thing to do would be to remove or redact real E-Mail addresses before posting as a courtesy to others. It's trivially easy to harvest E-Mail addresses from Web pages and this isn't a private Sonic Newsgroup.

I concur - and that goes both ways. Please be considerate, everyone.

[Michael]

Forums should be public and googlable

I mostly agree. However, there are some forums that should be private. Which is why I propose that Sonic adds to the board index a "Spam" forum. This new "Spam" forum would be private and only viewable via log-in. It would become the equivalent of the private "sonic.antispam" newsgroup that people once used and all Spam related posts would go there. A place were people can post full headers without taking the two seconds to redact certain content or worry about Web spiders crawling around mining data.

I am not going to start a war today, even though it is my instinct to.

Seriously, a "war" Anthony? Over this? Chill out.

[dane]

Forums should be public and googlable

I mostly agree. However, there are some forums that should be private. Which is why I propose that Sonic adds to the board index a "Spam" forum. This new "Spam" forum would be private and only viewable via log-in. It would become the equivalent of the private "sonic.antispam" newsgroup that people once used and all Spam related posts would go there. A place were people can post full headers without taking the two seconds to redact certain content or worry about Web spiders crawling around mining data.

Frankly, I don't think we spent much time looking at the sonic.antispam group - reports there were useful for members to discuss things like SpamAssassin scores, but the last thing we need is a dumping ground for spam here which no one is going to critically review or "do something" about.

We depend upon the various SpamAssassin components and their ongoing updates for the continual adaptation of our antispam system, and if you have a specific interest in improvement beyond simply tuning the various scores which we provide access to, becoming a contributor to the SpamAssassin project would be a better use of time.

[Michael]

Frankly, I don't think we spent much time looking at the sonic.antispam group - reports there were useful for members to discuss things like SpamAssassin scores, but the last thing we need is a dumping ground for spam here which no one is going to critically review or "do something" about.

That's pretty much what I was thinking when I made the suggestion. Whatever the new forum title; the purpose of the newly created private forum wasn't for Sonic to intervene on behalf of a user by collecting spam. Instead, the purpose was for a better location where users could freely discuss with others -- SpamAssassin scoring, Procmail recipe elements and other spam fighting strategies -- which often require the inclusion of full headers. In much the same way that sonic.antispam was private, the private forum would also eliminate the need for users to redact addresses in such posts on their own.

Well, it was a thought and I appreciate your consideration of the idea even if it ends up squarely in the bit bucket. <G>

[dane]

We focused on creating a limited number of forums in order to encourage more dialog in each. If and when one is overrun with tons of spam discussion, we'd consider creating a spam discussion forum.

When posting emails for discussion, please be considerate and redact email addresses.

[dukeofur]

I give. In the future, I will try to redact email addresses.

[gp1628]

As a general note to all readers:
Its a good netiquette when doing replies or copy/paste in general to take note of whether or not everyone on the original still needs to be included. Its true when replying to friends emails who have sent to many people, or replying to a newsgroup post which lists many newsgroups, or when replying or sharing a post on Facebook Google+ Twitter etc