Simon:

James I believe was doing "the right thing" and I feel having a go at the guy for being informative is bad form...

Yes, in this case, I think it was probably right.

[...] I was under the impression that an open community was somewhere the passage of information is accepted and not quashed..

I don't think you can draw that conclusion quite so generally. Yes, we love getting more information, but certain types of information have the potential to be very damaging if done in an uncontrolled manner. Generally, security alerts to this list are worse than useless, so they are "actively discouraged". In this specific case, there was probably justification for sending, though.

I'm sure that everyone has at sometime sent an e-mail that others have read about before without getting this sort of reaction.

Oddly enough, people don't tend to send me the typical junk "that others have read about before" any more. I wonder why ;-)