On Sat, 28 Mar 1998, Shannon Appel wrote:
> >In my humble opinion, allowing unmoderated posts by non-subscribers
> >is insane. Mailing lists are prime targets for spammers.
>
> Unfortunately what you propose is punishing the victims for the
> criminal's actions.
>
> Moderating your list to only allow subscribers to post is, no doubt
> about it, a hardship on your subscribers; it makes your list harder
> for them to use. A not insignificant numbers of your subscribers will
> try and post from a different address than the one your list server
> thinks they receive their email at, and thus they will fail.
> Experience says this is a continual problem.
Obviously, there is going to be a price to pay regardless of the
choice you make. I do have to spend some time helping my subscribers
who use alternative addresses. With listproc, it is fairly simple to
use the alias command to add any number of alternate posting addresses
while still sending the subscription to only one address. IMHO, If I
did not filter spammers, I would inconvenience my subscribers far more
by allowing spam to be sent through my lists. Once a spammer finds a
good delivery method, they tend to use that technique as much as they
can.
> The real solution is for ISPs to take definitive legal action against
> those criminals who violate their terms of service. Lacking ISPs moral
> enough to take this step, we can only pray that governments begin
> passing laws to prevent this abuse, much as they did for faxes a
> decade ago (and yes, there are several laws being considered in the
> United States).
Prosecution of spammers would be nice. In practice, very few ISP's
have the resources to pursue spammers in civil court. On the criminal
side, you would have to convince a prosecutor to press criminal
charges. Most prosecutors as not willing to expend their resources on
spam except in the most flagrant cases of repeat offense. A few cases
have been won both in the criminal courts and in civil cases. Not
enough wins yet to discourage the spammers. There is proposed federal
legislation which would make it much easier to pursue spammers in
civil court. This legislation is patterned after the junk-fax laws
already on the books.
> The bottom line being: inconveniencing your mail list members by
> locking up the list should be considering a last resort, and only
> undertaken if your list's address has actually gotten onto a
> criminal spammer's list.
Again I disagree. I consider setting up an occasional alias address
is a very small price to pay to prevent spam. You are certainly at
liberty to leave your lists open posts from anyone if you so choose.
I have no intention of changing my setups.
- murr -
