PC-DOS 3.3

Patrick Finnegan wrote: 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. 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. ... 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