[Mediawiki-l] spam bots

[Rick DeNatale]

I've got to agree with Morbus.

I HATE spam, not just for the annoyance of finding it in my inbox, but
even more  for the way it is causing various sysadmins to enact
measures which, taken to the extreme, will destroy the value of email.
 The tools are available to deal with it quite effectively at the
recipient's end, preferably at the client, or at least at the user's
mail server.

Obscuring e-mail addresses isn't the answer, neither are draconian
measures such as isps using blackhole lists to outright reject email
from 'suspicious' sources.  Filter, yes, but block no.  My isp throws
away email from any servers on various blackhole lists, which contain
at various times the servers which forward mail from yahoo groups, or
sourceforge mailing lists' etc. I've had to set up my own mail server
so that I can participate in these mailing lists in such a way that I
can censor them instead of my isp. No amount of explaining that they
are throwing away legitimate e-mails for their clients seems to get
through to many isps.

And since the original poster was complaining about spam to his gmail
account, he should be able to take solace in the fact that gmail seems
to have the best spam filtering (not blocking) which I've seen.  I've
been using gmail for a year or more, and it has had an astonishingly
high batting average both for correctly finding spam, but also for not
marking innocent email as spam. I think that I've only had something
like two incoming emails wrongly tagged as spam to my gmail account,
and a similar small number of real spam getting through.