> People were subscribing to all the lists, blasting them with spam, and > then immediately signing off.. Also, people were signing onto the list > and sending a "who" command to the list server, which allowed them to > harvest email addresses which they would then sell to spammers. > People started really bitching about the spam. Especially Jack Campin, > who is very sensitive about his email address getting out.
Spam sent to this list was a trivial problem compared with what I get from people who've mined this list or other web sources for addresses. The nastiest problem is the malignant little shit (who it is I don't know) who reposts these lists to the mail-archive site without any address munging despite me expressly forbidding it (in the body of messages he, she or it has already uploaded there). I'm shortly going to invalidate "jc" anyway, which will eliminate 200-300 spams a day in one fell swoop. (Also means I have to send out several thousand address-change notifications, i.e. at least a full day's work trawling through old mail to figure out who needs to be told; I presume that's exactly what the above-mentioned malicious little turd wants). Isn't majordomo flexible enough to allow automated user-driven subscription management without allowing a "who" command? "who" surely has few enough constructive uses that preventing spammers from using it matters more than making it available to legitimate users. (I doubt whether it's anywhere near as significant a source of address leaks as the web, though - if you're trying to spam everybody on a list, surely it's easier just to hit the list itself rather than extract addresses from it?) =================== <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/> =================== Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music & Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
