PC-DOS 3.3

[Jules Richardson]

Patrick Finnegan wrote:
> On Tuesday 13 December 2005 18:33, Jules Richardson wrote:
>> Google's masking of the address seems to be either one of two things:
>>
>> 1) Dumbing down of the medium in order to provide for idiots with no
>> common sense.
>>
>> 2) Typical corporate mentality; force users to use Google's interface
>> rather than their own email client in order to contact people.
> 
> I'm pretty sure it's #3:
> 
> 3) Prevent spammers from acquiring email addresses from the google 
> usenet archive.

Except that a lot of people from posts > 3 years aren't around on the same 
address any more, and people who have been posting for < 3 years have been 
generally well aware of the spam issues and so using munged addresses to post 
to (or creating an address specifically for Usenet posts).

Meanwhile, Google's posting interface itself appears to prevent users from 
munging their addresses and actually posts to Usenet with a live non-munged 
address.

> Would you rather have absolutely none of the old posts that they now 
> have indexed and freely available, or deal with not having email 
> addresses available?

I'd rather have it back how it was to be honest. I've never had a problem with 
spam, even when I had perfectly valid addresses amongst lots of archived 
postings in Google's archive whilst their old interface was in place.

If they're that worried about spam, then at the very least force users to sign 
into the system and put one of those "read the letters out of this graphic" 
security systems in place before the user can see an actual email address in a 
post in order to prevent harvesting. Not rocket science, but at least they 
data is all available.

> Personally, I find the content of usenet posts generally to be more 
> useful than the From: address on them...

... except when it doesn't go into enough detail, or some offhand comment in a 
post is relevant and chasing it up would be useful. If the author left a 
human-parsable email address in the header the assumption is that they weren't 
averse to someone contacting them, after all.

For an analogy, think of it like preserving old software but not noting down 
what format / system the software's for. It's still great when the system 
works, but there are going to be cases when it doesn't. Not archiving or 
making available all the data will always cause problems at some point further 
down the line.

cheers

Jules