Dealing with Fedora's mailing list

[gilpel at altern.org]

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.

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
another address that the one at my provider, but is it any better? Now,
it's Valentin Lacambre, who offers his email service for free, who will
have to deal with the problem of maintaining his black list tip top.

Of course, we all know that replacing the @ by (at) is no discouragement
to spammers. A simple script can do the replacement and, when things get
too complicated, there apparently are people in India who can do a more
custum job for very cheap.

Besides, what's the advantage of all those shenanigans to Red Hat? If I
wanted to spam this group, I'd open an account at Altern, from there one
at Google, from there, one at Yahoo, from there, one at Altern, from there
one at Google, 10 times around. It would take months before all the
addresses are exhausted.

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
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?


Back to the suggestions to solve my problem in real time.

It was suggested that I use Gmane. My new server is eternal-september.org
(Formerly Motzarella.) The gmane groups are not available. I wrote to
Wolfgang, whose's always doing his best to offer prime quality service...
and never sent the email.

With all his eternal-september users, the guy is busy. He surely knows
about Gmane and, being an open-source user himself, if he doesn't offer
Gmane, there must be a good reason for it.

One I can think of is that many of his users are loonies, no-life spammers
and, when they see the gmane groups, it's very likely that some of them
will see as a challenge to taunt all those clever geeks.

Another solution, if I understood well, would be to delete on arrival all
emails coming from Fedora lists at Altern and reading/posting from my
provider. (I hope I don't have to read at Altern and copy/paste at my
provider to answer! That would be a pain too.) I checked and it seems that
Evolution, Fedora's default email client for GNOME, permits threading.

My problem, is setting it to deal with Fedora/Red Hat servers, which was
done automagically at Altern but, when I send, I can't see the server I'm
sending to in the interface and there's a sleuth of server addresses at
Red Hat in the incoming headers, none of which have pop in them. I know
it's not necessary, but is the first on the list the one to use?

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?

I hope maintainers of this list won't object to a clear answer to those
questions...