[ale]OT It begins...

[ChangingLINKS.com]

> I've noticed that pipermail has started working. I have no idea why, but
> it is quite irratating as I spent along time getting it to work with no
> success.

Your efforts are greatly appreciated.

> 1. Most of the addresses have already been harvested once an address
> gets on a spam list it is traded around the spammer community. Pandora's
> box is wide open.

That is correct. However, changing the system DOES give us an opportunity to 
change our subscription email address - which will stay clean in the future.

> 2. Google probably has indexed the whole list and has that cached.

Yes. However, Google will "let it go" in 3 months or so (I forgot how long it 
takes them to update, but I think in the past is seemed about 3 months).

> 3. I suspect there are other archives lurking out there

Sure. Like http://web.archive.org/collections/web.html
But, *they* don't store much - not even images apparently. Other archives 
probably exist, however I don't believe that there would be an archive of the 
ALE for each month - kept "forever"  (except the ALE archive itself)

> 4. The old archives still have email addrs in them

Yes. The local Linux group successfully removed email addresses. It *may* be 
possible for me to acquire the script that they used to do it. It was done 
recently.

> If someone wants to write a little perl script that traverses a
> directory structure, takes each html file, obfuscates any email addrs;
> writes that file to /tmp/something; then moves that file back into place
> - I'll run it on the archives. Make sure the file perms are 644. 

If no one responds to do this within a few days, I volunteer to contact the 
other LUG for the script or (worst case) have one written. However, it seems 
like there are programmers on the list that could whip out a solution REALLY 
quickly. 

Someone offered something similar to this on the list awhile ago, and I use it 
often: perl -pi -e 's/\$oldvariable/\$newvariable/;' ./*

Surely this could be converted (by someone who knows perl well) and then 
looped over the files in a matter of 30 minutes or less (to write and 
execute).

Thank you for your response on this matter. 
While it doesn't seem to be an "extremely important problem," at the least our 
leaving raw emails in the archive seems like the tacit approval of spam:

"You have [. . . .] only re-harvested and even older thread whereby afterwards 
[NOTHING] was done. [. . . Further,] you have no grounds now to complain 
about how others use information (good or bad) that you have previously 
posted in an open forum." - Jim P.

Hopefully this time we will recognize that we should reduce our exposure to 
spam and followup with action. If no one can do it more quickly, I will 
volunteer my "programming skills." :)
-- 
Wishing you Happiness, Joy and Laughter,
Drew Brown
http://www.ChangingLINKS.com