in reply to Helping Possible Spammers?

A number of people seem to believe that we should not help anyone writing code that involves emailing a number of people or extracting email addresses, because of the potential for misuse.

I find this logic similar to refusing sale of a personal weapon (read: handgun) because it may be used to commit a crime.

You leave out all the people who have legimiate reasons for either owning a handgun, or working on large mail systems. There are legitimate ways to deal with criminials and spammers. Witholding support for everyone is not one of them.

My $.02,
ibanix

$ echo '$0 & $0 &' > foo; chmod a+x foo; foo;

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Re: Re: Helping Possible Spammers?
by BrentDax (Hermit) on Jan 18, 2003 at 04:55 UTC
    I find this logic similar to refusing sale of a personal weapon (read: handgun) because it may be used to commit a crime.
    An interesting point, and one I accept (for the record, I'm strongly anti-gun control). However, I do think that if a man walks into a gun shop with a murderous gleam in his eye and says "I want the cheapest thing that can kill someone", the seller should think twice about helping him with a purchase.

    In this case, the AM seems to have a spammer's gleam in his eye. He has a list of thousands of users, but is posting an error log line from at most a couple hours before the post, which suggests that either (a) he's just started this mailing, in which case he shouldn't have that many people yet or (b) he's just started being blocked by Yahoo, presumably for a good reason.

    =cut
    --Brent Dax
    There is no sig.