X-no-Archive:yes
Gavin, thank you for jogging my memory.
A year or so ago, in another list it was found that the postings from that
group were being archived by DejaNews. This was the Windows 95 list, which
had at that time 3000+ users. Somebody discovered the X-no-Archive trick,
after contacting DejaNews. Rapidly, a lot of people started using that
little trick, and it was interesting to see us disappear from the radar
scope, so to speak.
In those days I was posting quite frequently to that list, helping people
with their Windows 95 problems. I was getting 5-10 spam messages a day a
few weeks after my first postings to that list. That is also when the
DejaNews flap erupted. I don't think anyone knew the group was being
archived to DejaNews.
DejaNews is well known as the place where many spammers get their
addresses. Perhaps this is just an Urban Legend, but I don't think so.
Since typing X-no-Archive every time I posted a message to that list got to
be a pain, I included it in my signature. So every time I wrote a new
message, it would be there at the beginning, and all I had to do was start
typing right after it. On personal messages, I would just delete the line,
and start typing the message.
It got to be a habit; personal messages, remove the line, everything else
gets it. Some time ago, about 5-6 months, I unsubscribed from the Windows
95 list, as I only use NT on my PCs, and I could not answer some questions
without testing on Windows 95 first. Swapping disk drives just to answer a
question seemed ridiculous. Another side benefit of unsubscribing from
Win95-L was a sizable reduction in e-mail traffic. That list generated up
to 250 messages/day, which was the limit set by the list owner, and many
are the days when this limit would be reached. For example, the list would
be spammed, and wham, there would go 25 messages from all sorts of people
complaining about the spam, carefully quoting it all.
Thankfully, on this list and the others to which I subscribe, this never
happens. When spam hits this list, everybody deletes it and no one ever
complains about it. :->. Well not as much.
DejaNews did inform the person who contacted them that it was necessary for
the X-no-archive to be the first line in the body of the text, and not be
in the headers. I seemed strange, but it was verified.
When the Usenet question came up, I confused the two, but I was wrong
Usenet is not Dejanews, it feeds it. When someone complained they had not
seen my posting about the HP3000-L lunch on the Usenet, I mistakenly
thought it was due to my X-no-Archive trick. I also had recently another
private exchange on the issue and again confused the two. I can only blame
the severe drought we are experiencing, the lack of vacation and the
upcoming birth of my third daughter.
To this effect, I am taking two weeks off starting this week-end and going
somewhere where there is water and rain.
Now some of the other points from Gavin. I suspect strongly some of the
spam I am getting is due to the fact my e-mail address is at the Hicomp web
site. Also, I agree with Gavin, that altering the return address is not an
option. It is not polite and I use this address for everything.
My level of spam is down to one or two messages a day. I don't think this
is bad since I post frequently to this and other lists. The rules wizard
in Outlook (sorry Wirt) does a good job of dumping virtually all of it in
one folder, which in inspect every once in a while. Sometimes, valid
messages land in there, but that is rare.
And finally, oh, just a minute please, . . .
Ok, I'm back. Sorry about that. I just went to DejaNews and tracked down
COMP.SYS.HP.MPE and at the moment it has 714 postings. It goes back about a
month or so. None of my postings are there. So the x-no-archive does
work, at least for dejanews. And for me that is a good thing.
Kind regards,
Denys. . .
Denys Beauchemin
HICOMP America, Inc.
(800) 323-8863 (281) 288-7438 Fax: (281) 355-6879
denys at hicomp.com www.hicomp.com
-----Original Message-----
From: Gavin Scott [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday, 24 June, 1998 8:47 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: list echo to Usenet?
Denys writes:
> If you notice at the beginning of this message, I have inserted a command
> X-no-Archive. This prevents my messages from being posted to Usenet.
This does absolutely nothing to prevent your messages from being "posted
to Usenet". The list->Usenet gateway clearly ignores this (as it should)
since comp.sys.hp.mpe is full of denys postings at the moment.
What it does do is *ask* the archiving services like AltaVista and
DejaNews to please not permanently archive the message. There is no
guarantee that everyone is honoring this request.
Either way it won't do anything to eliminate spam from people who extract
e-mail addresses from news spools/feeds. X-no-Archive is probably useful
as a privacy tool, but not very much as an anti-spam technique.
I question whether the field will even work when it is clearly in the
body of the message and not the header, since we see it in Denys's
messages. It looks like it's supposed to be an RFC822 header. I've
not looked into how it's supposed to work though.
If you want to avoid spam, then don't post to usenet, and don't have
your e-mail address on any web pages. You can take the "nospam" route
and alter your return address, but if you ever want to ask for help
and actually expect people to answer you then I don't recommend this.
I answer a lot more postings privately than publicly these days, but
I generally won't bother to if I'm going to have to manually edit
the damn return address before it won't bounce.
G.
|
