On Sat, Jul 04, 2009 at 04:47:49 +0200, gilpel@altern.org wrote:
If there's anybody here who's in charge of Fedora's mailing lists, I must say that the way you're dealing with susbscribers seems dishonest.
When I subscribed, I was asked for a user name. This user name appears nowhere, just my email address. It seems the user name is just a way to make you believe that your email won't be divulged. Since I don't sleep well at all these days, I'm quite often absent-minded. So, I went back to Fedora's subscription interface in Firefox and, to my surprise, saw that Firefox remembered exactly what I had entered, my user name: LuckyDay. Well, fortunately, the support here is the best I've ever seen on any Linux group. Otherwise, I might not have considered the day so lucky :)
I don't know what's the reason for this, but it doesn't seem like a professional attitude to me.
This is a standard mailman interface. The names are visible to the people who manage the list.
Certainly, nowhere do you see in plain english that your email address will be made public. Being used to dealing with forums, I made sure to use
If you send email to a public email list, then it's public. People do things to try to keep the email from some of the automated address harvestors, but if it's a big enough list it will be worthwhile for spammers to subscribe and harvest addresses.
What would make sense, is asking people to subscribe from an address that correspond to an ISP. Even people who have their own mail server have a few addresses at their ISP. And even those servers could be accepted as
I don't. They provide me with a real network connection and nothing else. That's the way I like it.
they relate to the one from their ISP. Establishing a domain name for spamming is not very efficient either.
I'm not much of a techie, you already know that, but it seems to me that the only way to prevent spamming is to prevent people from registering from email service providers such as Google, Yahoo... or Altern, where it takes only minutes to register, then bye-bye.
But this is now permitted and there is...as far as I can see, not that much spam. So, once again, why all those shenanigans?
I think you are under the mistaken impression that asking for a name is an antispam feature. It's not. It is to help out people managing lists. I doubt Fedora uses this feature at all, but it is useful to some people who use mailman.
I had my fair share of trial and error these days. So, what should be my settings for pop and smtp, if those are the protocols used? If I use gilpel (at) altern org as my username and add my password, will Red Hat servers really see no diffrence whether I'm posting from Altern or my provider? Will emails be sent to Altern to check if I'm still using it as my email service provider?
mailman uses the envelope sender address to determine if you are subscribed or not.