Is there any way of using Freecycle that doesn't involve signing up to Yahoo Groups? I REALLY don't want a few hundred thousand more spammers getting my email address again...
I'm subscribed to about 20 various yahoogroups (with various accounts) and don't get that much spam, really. Also, when you set the group to be read on the web only, you don't even get mails you might not be interested in from the list.
Yahoo groups is indeed an annoying intrusive web interface ... but under the hood, all the work is done by a classic UNIX majordomo mailing list server. You can subscribe direct to the majordomo engine's mailing list by sending an email message, without going through all the webby spam-harvesting nonsense.
Find the email address of your local Freecycle mailing list. Mine is FreecycleEdinburgh; yours will be similar-ish. Send an email message to: FreecycleEdinburgh-subscribe@yahoogroups.com (possibly with subject "subscribe" -- the point is, it's the address of your local Freecycle mailing list, with "-subscribe" tacked onto the end of the username) and you should get a reply, telling you that if you want to subscribe you need to click on a link to Yahoo, or reply by email quoting a random number in the message. Reply by email, and you're on the list without having given Yahoo Groups (the annoying web/spam database) your email address.
I concur with the poster above: I have quite a number of addresses subbed to Yahoo! groups. Only one of them has received any spam, and that was a couple of items in the last year.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2006-03-30 02:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-30 02:47 pm (UTC)Also, when you set the group to be read on the web only, you don't even get mails you might not be interested in from the list.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-30 02:51 pm (UTC)Find the email address of your local Freecycle mailing list. Mine is FreecycleEdinburgh; yours will be similar-ish. Send an email message to: FreecycleEdinburgh-subscribe@yahoogroups.com (possibly with subject "subscribe" -- the point is, it's the address of your local Freecycle mailing list, with "-subscribe" tacked onto the end of the username) and you should get a reply, telling you that if you want to subscribe you need to click on a link to Yahoo, or reply by email quoting a random number in the message. Reply by email, and you're on the list without having given Yahoo Groups (the annoying web/spam database) your email address.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-30 02:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-30 05:08 pm (UTC)