Email spies

[unixronin]

This outfit and this domain are in cahoots, signing up PHP robots to mailing lists in order to archive those mailing lists, and publish the archives, without the knowledge or permission of the list members or maintainers.

Sure, there is no legal expectation of privacy in email.  But to publish an archive of someone else's mailing list without even telling them you're doing so, let alone asking permission, is damned rude at best.  One assumes the intended business model is to monetize other people's content via targeted advertising (and, some reports allege, by harvesting addresses off the lists for sale to spammers).

If you run a Mailman-based mailing list, and don't want Answerpot leeching your list, here's how you slam the door on their sockpuppets:  Simply go to each affected list's management page, go to the Privacy screen, and enter ^@zeusmail.org into the banned-addresses list.  This is a wildcard regular expression that will match any zeusmail.org address.  Then you'll probably want to go through and delete any zeusmail.org addresses.  The easy way to do that is from the command line:

# cd [Mailman list directory]
# for f in * ; do list_members $f | grep "zeusmail\.org$" | xargs remove_members -n $f ; done

(Note:  This example assumes that all Mailman tools are in your PATH.)