Subject: Re: Dan Bernstein's issues about namedroppers list operation

From: Thomas Narten <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Jan 2003 16:44:03 -0500

Aaron Swartz <[email-masked]> writes:

> 4) Any held message that is later approved for distribution on the
>     mailing list should appear on the list as a normal posting (e.g.,
>     with the proper sender in the From address, etc.).
> """

> Later, however, you write:
> >>       [...] However, in
> >>       the second message, he manually inserted my subscription  
> >> address,
> >>       despite my previous comments about private subscription  
> >> addresses
> >>       and forged unsubscription requests. (Was this malicious, or was  
> >> it
> >>       just mind-bogglingly stupid?)
> >
> > Or perhaps, it was to make it clear to the poster which address the
> > posting was coming from, since there seems to be confusion at times
> > about whether someone is posting from the same address to which they
> > are subscribed.

> Including someone's private subscription address is not done for a  
> normal posting. Doing it for a held message is a violation of the rule  
> above, no?

My recollection of the intent of the spam guidelines cited is two
things:

1) it wasn't good enough to just resend the message to the list such
   that the message now appeared to have come from the person who
   forwarded it. This makes it hard to quote authors appropriately in
   followups, find specific messages (e.g., to search for the message
   by the original poster). That sort of thing.

2) It wasn't appropriate to edit the message in a way that might lead
   someone to claim that the message had been edited to alter its
   intent.

Namedropper's mail that is manually forwarded has (for as long as I
can remember) included a line indicating it has been forwarded. The
current message (which was improved as a result of the recent
attention) is:

[ post by non-subscriber.  with the massive amount of spam, it is easy to miss
  and therefore delete posts by non-subscribers.  if you wish to regularly
  post from an address that is not subscribed to this mailing list, send a
  message to <listname>[email-masked] and ask to have the alternate
  address added to the list of addresses from which submissions are
  automatically accepted. ]

This seems like a reasonable thing to add to such messages. I would
not want the guidelines cited to mean this is not permissable or that
no other modification was permissible (e.g., adding a header line).

One can debate whether including the specific information cited above
was the right thing to do, but I don't see it as breach of the
guidelines.

Thomas

---

From: "D. J. Bernstein" <[email-masked]>
Date: 16 Jan 2003 00:59:20 -0000

Thomas Narten writes:
> was the right thing to do

That's the paragraph Bush added to other people's messages.

Bush added a different paragraph to my messages. (The ones he didn't
throw away, that is.) In that paragraph, he specifically included my
private subscription address, which hadn't appeared anywhere in the
messages I actually sent.

Unintentional, eh?

---D. J. Bernstein, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics,
Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago