[R] R-help going to become "subscriber-only"

Marc Schwartz marc_schwartz at comcast.net
Thu Jan 31 15:38:31 CET 2008


François Pinard wrote:
> [Dieter Menne]
>> hadley wickham <h.wickham <at> gmail.com> writes:
> 
>>> Unless nabble/gmane have hefty anti-spam protection in place, spammers
>>> will misuse those services.  A centralised target is just too
>>> tempting.
> 
>> Works well for gmane. You must be subscribed, and you have to enter 
>> a word from a blurbed what's-that-called picture.
> 
> A captcha.  See  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha

That becomes unneeded if one posts using the gmane NNTP interface as
opposed to the web interface. I don't use it for the R's lists, but do
for the various Fedora e-mail lists that I subscribe to.

The first time you post, you get a challenge/response e-mail to validate
your e-mail address, but then you treat it just like a Usenet group.

As Duncan noted, I am subscribed to those e-mail lists but do not have
any mail delivered. That is common for e-mail lists.

I have GNUS set up as my NNTP client and use it for these and regular
Usenet groups. This enable me to utilize all of the filtering features
of GNUS. One can of course use other such clients like Thunderbird, Pan,
Agent, etc.

This is one approach to keeping the list e-mails out of your regular
Inbox if you feel that the volume is problematic.

Another, which some have done, is to set up a Gmail account just for
list subscriptions, which keeps your "regular" e-mail account clean. You
can then set up labels (virtual folders) in Gmail to organize the list
e-mails and of course utilize Gmail's spam filtering. With Gmail, you
can just use the web interface, or use POP/IMAP clients to get the
e-mail on your desktop (or even on your smartphone.... ;-)

HTH,

Marc Schwartz



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