blu.org mailing list memberships reminder

John Chambers jc at trillian.mit.edu
Thu May 2 09:01:32 EDT 2002


RC writes:
| David writes:
| > I despise this feature of mailman,  Anybody can get their password sent to
| > them from the web page.  Why send a monthly reminder with your password in
| > cleartext?  I asked the admin to either change it or remove me.  He chose
| > to remove me.
|
| Alas, David.   The good old days are gone. The Mailman
| interfaces were designed for a class of users much less
| 'net-capable than you.
...
| So you find the inconveniences of mailing-list servers annoying?
| I do too.  Oh, well.  You can always filter out the messages
| that have the header "Subject: <servername> mailing list
| memberships reminder".

Doesn't this sorta miss the point?  Sending passwords in the clear in
email  messages  is just totally wrong.  Especially now that ISPs are
routinely  "harvesting"  information  from   email   for   commercial
purposes,   and  not  even  trying  to  hide  the  fact.   Sending  a
uid/password pair via email is one of the most  irresponsible  things
that any software (or administrator) can possibly do. If you're going
to do this, you shouldn't even bother with passwords.

(And that would make it even easier for the users described here. ;-)




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