>>>From: "David B. O'Donnell - AOL" <[log in to unmask]>
>>>We do, however, take that abuse seriously and take action
 
I can confirm that. I've reported problems to [log in to unmask], and
actually received replies indicating that action has been taken. Don't
confuse the service provider with the end user.
 
>>>My philosophy on this has been that if a member is incapable of keeping their
>>>mailbox at less than 550 pieces of online mail, then clearly they don't need
>>>to be on my lists.
 
I have some majordomo lists at netcom (which I'm shutting down in favor
of listserv lists elsewhere) that routinely fall prey to "spam subscribe"s.
The idea is to forge a subscribe request (netcom's version of MajorDumber
does not need confirmation) from an AOL user, and send that to thousands of
lists all over the world. The victim (generally an AOL user) is then dumped
on by either confirmation requests or actual welcome msgs.
 
It was once confirmed to me that AOL has a security problem, making this
sort of forgery easy and hard to detect. That may have been fixed by now.
Netcom currently monitors all of their lists, and some super-user process
goes around unbsubscribing people who appear to have subscribed to dozens
of lists all at once. That makes my job easier, but it still does not
prevent victims of such attacks from having full mailboxes.
 
SRE
 
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