The recent "Hi" message was a spam originating from the Online Marketers
Association. These people have, amongst other things, promised their
subscribers to never terminate their accounts regardless of *any*
complaints received. Therefore its possible for these subscribers to
send absolutely anything they may want through to anywhere they want.

OLMA is provided access by Agis, and Agis has abrogated their
responsibility over their customers in this area by assigning that
responsibility to yet another company, supposedly not part of Agis.
IEMMC filters all mail that Agis customers send, and in doing so, adds
an X-Advertisement: header that says,

Visit http://www.iemmc.org for name removal information

You can then add your email addresses (one at a time with no wildcard
features whatsoever) and they say they will prevent any of their members
(Agis customers only) from sending you spam.

So, I would suggest that you list managers make sure you submit your
list addresses to this stupid service to avoid the messages like the one
this list received. I think its reprehensible that Agis feel they can
sherk their responsibility this way, and IEMMC (who state that they are
in business to provide SPAMmers a way to SPAM) think that entering each
and every email address you might manage is the way to allow people to
turn off SPAM.

If I were to try and be proactive and prevent all of my users from
receiving SPAM, I might have to enter thousands of names into this
stupid web interface. Then each one is mailed a validation code which
has to be entered into a different page again with the corresponding
email. Can you imagine the effort?

Cheers,
Russ
R.C. Consulting, Inc. - NT/Internet Security
owner of the NTBugTraq mailing list:
http://ntbugtraq.rc.on.ca/index.html