Re: Get your share of $1.4 million!

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Friday, April 6, 2001 at 21:59:41 (-0600), D. Stimits wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: Get your share of $1.4 million!
>
> How does garbage like this join and stay on a list? I get a ton of spam
> that indicates it is routed through the gnu.org lists.

Almost all of the spam I get these days comes directly from gnu.org.

> Can advertisers
> and bulk spammers be removed?

Officially, no.

After sending similar complaints months ago (Jan 23, 2001) to the FSF I
just finally tonight got an "official" reply from the vice president of
the FSF, Bradley Kuhn, stating (in a style typical of RMS actually) that
they wouldn't block any e-mail, especially not based on third party RBLs
and the like, because they might accidentally once in a blue moon block
one poor fool's legitimate message because his MTA was accidentally
mis-configured and accidentally became an open relay or some such.  The
FSF folks don't seem to realise that everyone knows how to resend a
message once they've either fixed their mailer or chosen a new service
provider who takes more careful care of their mailers.

He effectively went as far as to claim that the FSF does not believe any
e-mail message can be considered as spam.

Pure B.S. if you ask me!

Oddly this policy of theirs to freely re-distribute all spam to all of
their mailing list subscribers isn't clearly stated on their web site or
on the subscription confirmation messages they send out.

Personally I'm going to find other forums which are managed in a much
more responsible way and which treat their intended community with far
more care and respect than the FSF has come to do.  I will soon be
unsubscribing from all public gnu.org mailing lists on which I continue
to receive spam.  I encourage everyone else to do likewise.  If everyone
leaves it won't be very hard at all to find willing hosts for alternate
forums in which free software topics can be discussed without intrusion
from known spammers, open relays, and such.  In fact I'd hope most such
new lists will be set up so that only subscribers may post freely to
them.  If the list managers should wish to sort through unsolicited
postings by non-subscribers and forward on only the non-spam then they'd
obviosly be welcome to do the job!

-- 
                                                        Greg A. Woods

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