On Mon, 13 Jan 1997 13:48:09 -0600 Catherine Anne Foulston said:
>(...)
>We have a real problem with these bogus subscriptions.  There are
>a LOT of them.  If they all came from a single source, it would be
>easy to stop them, but they don't.  I'm wondering, though, if
>there is some web page or something out there that people are
>using to do this.  This is probably off-topic for lstsrv-l but if
>anyone knows of somewhere it's being discussed, please let me know.
 
SJU has 3 out of 350+ lists that have been getting clobbered with this
stuff for a couple of months now and I have been wondering more or less
the same thing myself.  The view from here is that some high ranking
messiah among the legions of pimpled brain-doners circulated an exec or
macro that takes 1 to 20+ parameters and does the SMTP forgeries from
arg1 using args2 to n as the name.  Since many of the perps use only one
or two args most of the subscriptions bomb out for invalid syntax.  The
rest usually are to invalid addresses, full mailboxes, user refused or
expire confirmation.  Still, there's enough traffic and resulting
bouncemail to make this annoying.  Much of what I've seen lately comes
from cornell.edu and various asian domains, but it has been coming from
all over.  A minor sociological pattern I've noticed is that most of
the people doing this don't use mixed-case and seem to find the use of
the eff-word as a name a real knee-slapper.
                                                      -Kary