27 February, 1995 ottawa Canada
 
Until someone invents a one picoton nuclear device that can be delivered
over the net to nuc just the problem user and not his neighborhood, I
suppose we have to accept spammers as a fact of life and react to them
by asking their site admins to spank them for us.
 
We can act pro-actively to prevent spams by:
 
making the subscribe command open but only by owner and
making send private.
 
So only members of the list can post.
 
Of course they could spam and run by issuing a signoff immediately.
 
To make signoff rrestricted, a validate all is required and that means
the dear listowners (one or more of us) have to issue the actual signoff
for the user.
 
One postmaster tipped me off to a neat trick:
 
send: editor
editor: <active-editor>
editor <list-name>
subscribe: public confirm
What this does is:
To subscribe, you must confirm the subscription request and that slows
down batch files trying to spam.
Unlike send: private, defining the entire list as editors (quiet
editors) every member can post but only the active editor, listed first
gets postings from outsiders.
 
Rather than being rejected out of hand, posts from outsidrs will be sent
to a live person or persons who may elect to approve them and send them
on to the list.  They may also request the author to revise the material
or trash the material or advise the author of the original what their
editorial decision is.
 
So it provides SPAM control at the price of some person having to review
the stuff and pass judgement upon it.
 
Another thought comes to mind: spam-l which is a list we put all known
spammers on and post to it each message we deem to be spam!
 
Perhaps our spammers would mend their ways if fed a heavy diet of SPAM
for say a month or two.
 
Complete with ansi music sequences to paly the SPAM song upon their pc
speaker.
 
Just a thought.