DSand95510@aol.com writes:
> About a week ago, Alpine and Tiger list members were asked if they wanted to
> remove the "WHO" request function, so that spammers (advertisers) could not
> easily identify and blitz us with their junk mail. What has happened to that
> poll?
Mark Bradakis (aka MJB), owner/admin of node autox.team.net, was the
one who sent that message. Send comments about WHO to
mjb@autox.team.net. Dick, I've forwarded your message to him.
> I, for one, can live without the marginal utility that the "WHO" command
> provides.
I am the Alpines list admin, and live in Alabama. Mark Olson is the
Tigers list admin; he lives in California. Autox.team.net is in Utah.
E-mail is our only access to the list administration commands. As a
list admin, I find the WHO command valuable when trying to track down
subscriber problems. I've mailed MJB and asked him to at least leave
the WHO command enabled for the list admins, but I don't think
majordomo provides this capability.
> The E-mail marketeers are obviously just starting to get in gear. In a few
> months we should expect to be innundated with many times the current junk
> volume.
I agree. It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better,
unfortunately.
> Besides the time wasted wading through the garbage and deleting it,
> if you don't have flat rate internet access, its starting to cost you money
> in downloading time. Imagine paper junk mail showing up in your mailbox -
> with postage due!!
More sophisticated mailer programs can show you the subject lines and
sizes of your messages, then let you choose which ones to download.
If your Internet provider's mail client doesn't offer this
capability, mail them and ask for it. Also, take a look at web sites
like TUCOWS (http://tucows.myriad.net/tindex.html), there are some
amazing freeware/shareware mailers out there.
There are some things we can do to the lists, but they will have
limited effectiveness:
1. private_who -- Majordomo provides a capability that only people on
the list may use the WHO command. It is currently disabled for the
Alpines and Tigers lists; I am happy to enable it if that is the
consensus. The disadvantage is that it is easily bypassed by sending
the following 3 commands to majordomo:
subscribe alpines
who alpines
unsubscribe alpines
2. Closed subscriptions -- Right now the lists are open subscription,
which means that anyone may subscribe/unsubscribe themselves. We can
change this to closed subscriptions, meaning that the list admin would
have to approve any subscribe/unsubscribe command. This, coupled with
private_who, might be an effective deterrent to spammers. However, it
will cause a delay for anyone wishing to join or leave the list.
3. Moderation -- This is a big step. It means that all messages to
the list would have to be approved by the admin. In these times,
however, we're not seeing a lot of spam sent directly to the list, so
I don't think it would be an effective deterrent. The spammers are
becoming more sophisticated by building their own address databases
and spamming folks directly, rather than sending the spam through
lists like Alpines and Tigers. Given its limited effect, and as the
one who would bear the brunt of moderation of the Alpines list, I'm
pretty strongly opposed to it at this point.
Feel free to comment on any of the above.
--
T.J. Higgins
tjhiggin@ingr.com
Huntsville, AL
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