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No more bugreports from me.

It's not fun to reports bugs to the Debian bug tracking system. The thanks you get is spam.
I have a special e-mail address that I use then I'm little afraid that it becomes public. My intention is to change that address then it collect to much spam.
But my latest contribution to the Debian bug tracking system was a big mistake. http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=45480
The report you can see was a ordinary e-mail sent to the maintainer of Aptitude. He saw it as a Dpkg thing and asked me if he could send it to the public dpkg list. I said O.K. Now you can think I have to blame myself but I could never thought about that he would include my personal information, including my main e-mail address, then he send it further to the public dpkg list. But he did.
To avoid spam I send a mail, four days ago, to the Debian bug tracking system administrator and asked him to remove my personal information. I haven't heard from him and my personal information is still public in the bugreport.
Today I got my first spam ever to my main e-mail address and now I'm very angry and dissatisfied. Spam should not be the drawback for reporting bugs, I think. And the Debian bug tracking system is not a place there I want to contribute anymore.

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The other person just sent

Submitted by pinniped on Tue, 2006-08-15 17:01.

The other person just sent the email as 'forward' so your email address was included. Since he didn't edit beforehand (no one really does) it also included your signature which you sent. What spam are you getting? I have never had spam from these lists before.

I'm not very happy with some of my bug rpeorts; I think my last complaint was direct to the KDE group; the people involved made a lot of noise then continued to do things the wrong way! The result is that a program which can be very useful is crippled by a Microsoft-style EPS export (convert to ugly, large bitmap and label 'EPS'). But sometimes you get lucky and people fix things without any hassle. I keep a separate yahoo email address just for things like this - mainly because I don't want anyone stealing my email and sending me garbage. At least with yahoo I just remove the account and create another.

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Yesterday I won money in a UK lottery

Submitted by MagnusBerg on Wed, 2006-08-16 05:41.

Yesterday I won money in a UK lottery. And I also got, I think, some virus (but for Windows) in for of a greeting card but then I clicked on a link it was no greeting card but a exe file. And to day I got a mail from a (it's so stupid :-)) 64 years old woman who is dying in cancer and want to give me money for the good work of God.
All seems to be targeted to a American audience even if the first one had a Italian e-mail address. And as I said before they started to drop in four days after my mail address got public.
The thing I dislike most with spam is that they are so stupid. If they was clever enough to fool me I should like them better. Then somebody say they want to send med money for unbelievable reasons or windows virus I get angry. But I have heard about people who have thought that they really could get money for nothing and instead lost a lot.

I have reported my opinion to http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2006/08/msg00123.html and suggested them to create a script that hides the mail address in the future. So now I will get spam to that mail address too. ;-) It can't go on like this! :-(

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Interesting reading the

Submitted by bettlebrox on Sun, 2006-10-15 15:35.

Interesting reading the replies to your e-mail on the discussion list.

Most of them seem to be people boasting about how much spam they get and their solutions in dealing with them. They seem to forget that not all of their users may be as technical as them ...

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And it says a lot of the community.

Submitted by MagnusBerg on Mon, 2006-10-16 07:14.

I agree that their replies was interesting. And it says a lot of the community. I defended them (the Debian community) in my blog before but now I take my hands of them. I have installed and used Spamassasin. But I don't like the idea that first download the spam end then try to deal with it. And then, as you pointed out, I'm not able to do a safe configuration. Even if I have a folder named spam to redirect potential spam to I have to look in it to make sure that real mail doesn't end up there. And that happens now and then.
Yesterday I realiced something totally new for me: I don't think I have knowledge enough to run Debian. Read about it in my blog soon.

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I agree with you -

Submitted by pinniped on Mon, 2006-10-16 07:22.

The Sydney (Australia) Linux User's Group has a very open public mailing list. Since I joined using my work email, I now get spam on a daily basis. I should have guessed that from the 'FAQ' defending an open mail list. My immediate impression was "these people don't know what they are doing because no one with any pride in their work can be this lazy". Of course I have removed myself from that list, but the spam keeps coming. A Belgian friend of mine would always laugh at these situations and say "It must be an American" because according to him the American manuals were always the worst - many pages are wasted on the simplest things and when something important but complex comes up, only a few words are used (because the people writing the manual don't understand what they are doing). So when people come up with an excuse not to do something sensible he always says "Bah, it must be an American".

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I have learned new things. :-)

Submitted by MagnusBerg on Tue, 2006-10-17 04:50.

I have learned new things since I wrote my mail to the mailinglist. Hiding the e-mail address behind a usual html link is not enough to hide it from spamrobots as I thought before. But other bug report systems ask their contributors to register themself to be able to post bug reports. And with such solution I think it's possible to totally hide the users e-mail addresses from spamrobots but still contact the contributors. It's not little strange that the Debian people doesn't can come up with such solution instead of recomending spamfilters.

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