On Sat, 26 Feb 2005 09:18:41 -0500, Joshi B. <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

<snip>
>One thing you might want to be aware of is that your name and email
>are getting relayed to the comp.sys.hp.mpe usenet group when you reply
>to the list.
Yep, there is a gateway passing messages in both directions and has been
for a long, long time.

>Groups like that are regularly harvested for spam lists by things called
>spambots.
Very sad but true.  They can harvest that information from many different
places but the Usenet groups are a popular feeding ground.

>Anyone who puts information like that out in the clear is nuts.
Ok, but you just put your "[log in to unmask]" email address out there for
everyone to see as well.  Maybe that is a bogus address and you just don't
care?

>
>The gateway between the list and the group has been quite sick for a
>while, and apparently will be shut down entirely.  But it has been
>quite reliable at sending messages from the list to the group, allowing
>valid email addresses to be exposed.  Since the people who use the list
>aren't generally internet savey, maybe it's for the best that the
>gateway die.

I just posted a message letting people know that the gateway service will
be continuing under a different sponsor so although I'm not going to be
operating it anymore, it will still continue to serve the MPE community.

  Just to clarify things, the gateway itself (in this incarnation) is just
a piece of software that reads messages in an email account written to by
the HP3000-L and posts those messages to the comp.sys.hp.mpe newsgroup as
well as reads the same newsgroup and posts any new messages back to HP3000-
L.  There are a few things in there to make sure we don't get the same
message going back and forth in an endless loop, but all in all it's a
simple program written in ColdFusion.  What it will be written in when it's
brought up next I'm not sure, but the functionality will be approximately
the same.  The reason that gateway has appeared "sick" has nothing to do
with the software, but rather from changes made by my ISP.  The
gateway "generally" will go for months without any intervention on my part,
so when problems did arise, I wasn't monitoring things (I'm not as involved
with the 3000 as I once was so I didn't notice that messages were not being
gated appropriately).  That being the case, I decided that if people still
wanted that functionality, it needed to be provided by someone still
actively involved (and that isn't me at least at this point in time).

  Saying that users of the HP3000-L "aren't generally internet savey" is
probably naive.  I'd venture to guess that the majority of the HP3000-L
userbase has a better grasp on the good, bad, and ugly aspects of the
Internet than do most people.  We've had debates about the merits of
keeping the gateway functionality many times in the past (just check the
archives for some of the more "colorful" exchanges :) and unless you happen
to be a relative new-comer to the list the facts of Internet life have been
explained time and time again.  Every time, the majority of those who took
the time to voice an opinion on the matter voted to keep the interchange
alive.  I would expect it's about time to have this debate again.

Regards,
Michael L Gueterman
Integrated Information Systems
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