Back in January we undertook a little project to probe as many servers
as we could to determine how many had viewable membership lists. We
promised to report back here when the project was complete. Well, it's
taking longer than expected because we were sidetracked by paying work,
but here are the results to-date:

# of 
lists   Result
------  -------------------------------------------------
22337   Unchecked so far
130     Outstanding request, response not parsable, etc
14346   Membership is viewable by public
1573    Review/who disabled
5207    Viewable by admins and subscribers only (private)
838     Viewable by admins only
38379   Server reports 'who' disabled
485     REVIEW command unrecognized
234     List name does not exist

The 'viewable' lists returned a little over 2 million lines containing
what looked like email addresses in the responses. We haven't kept track
of the addresses returned, so there's bound to be some garbage,
overlapping addresses and whatnot, but it's close enough for this
purpose.

The vast majority of the results are from majordomo & listproc lists,
but only because they're popular and fairly easy to parse.

If you happen to see a probe from [EMAIL PROTECTED], it's just the
automated script.

Rick

-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Vandenberg [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Rick
Vandenberg
Sent: Thursday, January 11, 2001 8:26 AM
To: Rick Vandenberg
Subject: An update of our look at 'who' commands 


Last week I mentioned that we were taking a slow look at whether or not
servers had open membership lists. Based on our early results - which
indicated a large percentage of lists had viewable membership lists, we
expanded that into a proactive, wide-ranging look at every list server
we could find an address for.

I just wanted to let people know about what we're doing.

Rick Vandenberg

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