Alex, it's  not a LISTSERV problem,  it's a BITNET problem.  It goes much
farther than that, from my terminal I can shut down or purge the spool of
a good  number of BITNET  sites, and nobody seems  to care (at  least the
politicians don't  and do  their best  to forget  about all  these little
irrelevant  technical annoyances).  My node  is protected  against *that*
type of security problems, but the concept of trusted mailers imply that,
if there  is ONE  trusted mailer  in the network  that lets  people forge
mail, you cannot protect yourself against that (and I wish there was only
one :-) ).
 
Besides  which, LSTSRV-L  is  very loosely  protected,  like most  public
lists. Increasing  the level of  protection makes life more  annoying for
subscribers and increases the amount of work  of the list owner, so it is
rarely done for public forums with lots of subscribers that come and go.
 
  Eric