Re: Fruitopia, Fake Student Marketing Tactics

[Ulrich Grepel <uli@zoodle.robin.de>]

Hi!

Karen wrote:
> Oh no, not the "I'm only a student, please don't completely clog up my
> e-mail system with four gazillion copies of "The Garden" in revenge for
> me taking up 68% of your digest space with moronia" tactic.  Student my
> ass.  How stupid do they think people are?

I answered in private email to Karen:
> On the other hand, which stuff do you mean to keep out of the digest? Did I
> overlook some messages?

Now I write:

Ok, I've found 'it'. I overlooked it for the first time, because, well, I
just skipped that huge spam posting the first time. 'twasn't the first one,
and won't be the last one unfortunately. I then rechecked and found the
'I'm just a student' etc.

Groumpf.

Well, unfortunately I can't see a good way to keep these out of the newsgroup
AND mailing list (why not spare the newsgroup as well?) except for either someone
monitoring each post or for a kind of 'subscribers-only' list/newsgroup.

The latter might be a way. Each message from any person that posted something
approvable before will get through immediately, while each message from a
hitherto unknown email address will have to wait for approval. But I don't think
Bill Wisner (or anyone else) has time for even 'just' that. Nevertheless it would
be a solution.

I've just played around with awk, sort and uniq, and found 1415 different
email addresses in From: lines for the last 20 or so months. I only counted
the real address part (user@site.domain), not the various different 'real names',
and I removed upper/lower case differences, before that there were even more.
I don't think Bill has time to approve 2.5 new addresses per day. Each day.
By the way, there've been 6922 From: lines in that time frame. So every 5th
article has a brand new edress.

I didn't check for the From: lines to be in the header, so any quoted From:
line counted as well. For the curious (basic version):

grep From: mbox | awk '$1=="From:" {print;}' | awk '$2~/.*@.*/ {print $2;next;} $(NF)~/<.*@.*>/ {print substr($(NF),2,length($(NF)-2));next} {print;}' | tr A-Z a-z | sort | uniq | wc -l

gee - I love UNIX ;-).

Bye,

Uli


--
"Ein 32-Bit-Betriebssystem fuer uns?" - "Wozu? Wir haben doch zwei mit 16."
[IBM ad promoting OS/2]

                                3.29
          6) The Dreaming                                       4.41
          7) Running Up That Hill                               5.00
          8) Hounds of Love                                     3.02
          9) The Big Sky                                        4.41
         10) Cloudbusting                                       5.10
         11) The Sensual World                                  3.57
         12) This Woman's Work                                  3.32
         13) December Will Be Magic Again                       4.50
         14) Un Baiser D'Enfant                                 3.00
         15) Experiment IV                                      4.21
         16) Running Up That Hill (ext. mix)                    5.45
         17) Cloudbusting (The Organon Mix)                     6.31

(Timing information was collected from other releases)

Ciao,

Uli


--
"Ein 32-Bit-Betriebssystem fuer uns?" - "Wozu? Wir haben doch zwei mit 16."
[IBM ad promoting OS/2]