Message-ID: <v02130518ae1e12b6d98b@[196.20.30.2]> Date: Fri, 26 Jul 1996 08:03:30 +0100 From: Dr Eberhard W Lisse <mailto:el@LISSE.NA> Subject: Re: your mail To: Multiple recipients of list DEVEL-L <mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU>
Iain,At 12:47 AM 26/7/96, Iain Walker wrote: >Precisely. For some reason DEVEL-L seems to get a lot of junk mail - how
>is this happening? I know some people pay dearly for their mail, as
>indeed I will be doing come next year, and don't need this sort of thing.
>
>Perhaps moderating the list might be an idea?
The reason, as explained before :-)-O is that this list is a newsgroup in disguise. Now someone spams the news system, some programs called cancelbots figures this out and issue control messages to make these messages disappear from the news system. However this can't happen once the message has transversed the news-mail gateway.
Moderating is a lot of work so nobody was prepared up to now to do it :-)-O.
One can do something sneaky, namely make the newsgroup moderated and putting the mailing list's address (!) as the moderator. Then one makes the mailing list closed which means you can only post to it once you subscribe to it, which will cause these spam messages to be rejected.
Or one can just delete them.
Or one can try and find the originating addresses (if not forged) and ask the sysadmin to investigate...
el
-- Dr. Eberhard W. Lisse \ / Swakopmund State Hospital mailto:<el@lisse.NA> * | Resident Medical Officer Private Bag 5004 \ / +264 64 461503 (pager) 461005 (home) 461004 (fax) Swakopmund, Namibia ;____/ Zone/Domain Contact for the NA-DOM Vice-Chairman, Board of Trustees, Namibian Internet Development Foundation, an Association not for Gain. NAMIDEF is the Namibian Internet Service Provider.