** Sometime around 11:24 -0500 3/28/98, murr rhame said:
>In my humble opinion, allowing unmoderated posts by non-subscribers
>is insane. Mailing lists are prime targets for spammers. If you can
>send your spam through a mailing list, you get nearly 100% delivery
>rates and some innocent mailing system does the dirty work. Subscriber
>lists are also extremely tempting targets for spammers.
Hallelujah, brother.
If you haven't limited your mailing list to posts by subscribers only,
then you have no basis for complaints about spam on the list.
"But what about people who need to be able to post from multiple accounts?"
Ah. Think we haven't already broached that problem, eh? Wrong. It's easy:
They subscribe from every account from which they might need to post, and
simply set the "extra" accounts to NOMAIL.
"But my mail server doesn't have a NOMAIL feature!" Another easy one --
you are obviously running the wrong MLM software. It's no longer a friendly
'Net out there. Spam means war -- and if you do not have sufficiently
sophisticated weapons to deal effectively with the threat, then you will
lose the war.
"But that's really inconvenient!" Right. So is having to lock your car when
you go to the mall. But at least it's there when you return. Or so the
theory goes.
And if you haven't secured your address list so that only the list OWNERS
can get to it, then you are doing your subscribers a *major* disservice.
I routinely have people try to acquire the subscriber lists for my mailing
lists; I've even had people who've gone to the trouble of subscribing first,
apparently under the impression that the address lists might be available to
subscribers. And yes, I can usually tell the difference between someone who
is trying "standard" methods to get his *own* subscription information, and
someone who is hoping to acquire a long list of active addresses.
There's a war going on. Act like it. ;-)
__________________________________________________________________________
Vince Sabio It's back: <http://www.insane.net/tsc/Vince/>
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Stop Internet Spam! <http://www.cauce.org/>
Ted Kaczinsky meant well -- he just needed a better target list.
