Mailing list spam

[Jeffrey Watts]

On Wed, 29 Mar 2000, Bradley Miller wrote:

> I personally vote for making the list "closed" in which people cannot
> send unless they have subscribed to the list.  Yes, some may argue
> that they will not be able to send mail then from a different
> location.  I don't see this as a problem -- if it's that big of an
> issue, get a generic account where you can use it via a web browser
> interface (or build your own) and call it good.
[ ... snip ... ]
> I think people here should be bright enough to get onto the list and
> off of it by themselves.  Likewise I don't think it should be a
> problem for some people to develop work-arounds by closing the list
> off.

All I can say is this -- should the needs of 60% outweigh the needs of
40%?  Are you willing to exclude 40% (or whatever) of kclug's memberbase
to stop infrequent spam, especially when there are good methods of
filtering out?

Also, are _you_ willing to answer the flood of newbie questions asking
this:  "I tried to send mail from my work account, and it didn't get
posted -- what happened?".  I guarantee you that you will get many, and
this same flamewar will resurface every six months or so.

I've done KULUA for 4 years now, and we've gone through this.  making
'accept' equal to 'dist' is a bad idea.  Red Hat apparently has(had?) an
interesting solution, in that they had a dummy mailing list that sent no
mail, and one could subscribe all of their email addresses to, and the
'dist' file for it was used as the 'accept' file for all of the real
mailing lists.

This is an interesting solution, would be the an acceptable solution if
you decide make the MLM check the "From:" field for presence in 'accept'.

J.

o-----------------------------------o
| Jeffrey Watts                     |
| watts at jayhawks.net            o-------------------------------------o
| Systems Programmer            | "Jesus may love you, but I think    |
| Sprint - Systems Management   |  you're garbage wrapped in skin."   |
o-------------------------------|  -- Michael O'Donohugh              |
                                o-------------------------------------o