One of the most frequently asked questions regarding the new Mozilla news server is whether or not people will need to munge their posting addresses, to prevent spammers from getting their addresses, like they do on Usenet newsgroups. I’ve never been able to answer that, because I just don’t know. News.mozilla.org is not propagated to Usenet, but is archived on Google; so the question is: How much of that spam is a result being archived on Google, and how much is a result of being propagated to other Usenet servers?
The Good:
I’ve created an email alias specifically for news.mozilla.org, which I only use on news.mozilla.org. If/When I get spam, I can look at the headers, to see if it was sent to my news.mozilla.org address. Currently, 1 month after the server went live, 207 of my news.mozilla.org posts are on Google. I have not received any spam sent to my news.mozilla.org address.
The Bad:
Just recently, it appears one independent news administrator decided to work around the lack of usenet feed, by copying the articles right off news.mozilla.org, and mirroring them on his/her own server. Potentially, he/she could feed the groups to usenet.
The Ugly (profanity ahead):
Any news administrator who decides to do this, is an asshole for doing so. People post messages on news.mozilla.org with the impression that their posting addresses are not going to be propagated to usenet. The Mozilla Foundation consciously decided not to propagate to usenet; and this(these) news admin(s) are completely disrespecting that decision, and being inconsiderate to those using news.mozilla.org. All because one or two people are too spoiled and lazy to set up a second news account in their newsreader (which can easily be done).
February 24, 2006 update: I have just received one spam message sent to my news.mozilla.org address. Probably due to bug 326759