Bob McCown asked,
| Then what's the solution to this? We dont want to alienate anyone bringing
| over a legitiimate 50k address list, yet we should do something for
| validation when someone does....
You probably won't like my answer, but you should make transfers and all
other listowner-originated additions opt-in. If the victim, er, potential
subscriber wants to join, he or she needs to reply; no response means no
subscription and no further mail.
A listowner moving to ListBot with 50,000 addresses should get the fish-eye,
not the red carpet. Yes, there are legitimate opt-in mailing lists that have
that many subscribers, but by now the spammers outnumber them. If you see
multiple variants of a single address among the 50,000, then you know for
sure that it's phony. And if the listowner complains, "but I'll lose mem-
bers!" ask why (s)he wants to keep sending mail to people who don't want it
or who aren't interested enough in it to say yes to it.
Just yesterday, for the second time, three obsolete, deprecated forms of
another email address of mine, not given out by me since 1996 and all in
disuse before I had HTTP access, were added to a single ListBot list and
sent a welcome letter that informed me I had opted in by having done busi-
ness with the listowner (who gave neither a name nor an email address [ex-
cept [EMAIL PROTECTED]] nor any other indication of who it was or
what business of its I had purportedly patronized). Clearly bull. And,
while I've seen people so interested in a list that they subscribe more than
one of their own addresses to it (for example, a work address to keep up with
it during business hours plus a personal address to keep up with it outside
business hours), why on earth would I ask for three subscriptions that end up
in the same mailbox, even to a list that I want? As anyone on list-managers
can see, those three addresses of mine were on a very old spam target list,
and this listowner was just adding every address it had ever heard of.
We just had a similar discussion on a list devoted to running lists on
eGroups. The MAPS people are threatening them with being RBLed unless they
disable the opt-out add facility; invitations and opt-in additions are ac-
ceptable to them but not the opt-out type. The position I expressed there is
that somewhere one has to draw a line between minor and major changes in a
list. I've done a couple of each (list-managers will be spared the details)
and have just moved the membership rolls for the minor changes but have re-
quired opt-in consent for the major ones, such that declining to respond
meant not being there after the change.
When a list is moved from a private setup to a big listhost or from one big
listhost to another, the facilities and policies of the new host will dictate
so much about the way the list runs that in my view it's a major change and
subscribers should need to confirm their willingness to stick around. It's
just not the same as the list they joined.
At the very least, when someone claims to have an established mailing list,
investigate. See whether the various lists of lists had an entry for it when
it was at its old host; see whether there are archives at its old host; see
whether the old host's administrators will confirm its having run there. One
suggestion in the discussion regarding the opt-out problem at eGroups was to
take a sampling of the addresses that the listowner wants to add -- the list-
owner should provide the entire set of addresses and the listhost should do
the sampling -- and send them opt-in messages. If the results have too many
bounces, proactive refusals, or failures to respond, reject the list. There
should need to be a significant number of acceptances (a handful may indicate
that the list was temporarily sprinkled with addresses that reach the owner)
and only a few bounces (too many would show that the list is not pruned,
typical of spammers); allowing for a couple "I never joined any such list"
responses that might be lies from disgruntled members or mistakes by forget-
ful ones, proactive refusals should be few to none and should be silent of
complaints or even state that yes, they did join, but they've recently lost
interest. Again, that requires human work-hours from the listhost staff.
The only automated way that doesn't welcome spammers is to get rid of opt-
out addition.
