Valdis,

Valdis Kletnieks wrote:
> On Sat, 20 May 2006 00:26:09 EDT, Dan Wheeler said:
> 
>>fairly close-knit communities of participants. We have *never* had an 
>>incident of someone forging an editor address to post to one of the 
>>lists.
> 
> You're very lucky.  At least several times a day, somebody who's at some time
> been on one of our lists has gotten infected with some virus/worm that
> spreads by grovelling e-mail addresses off the victim's hard drive.

No, we have not been so lucky. We've had our share of the virus/worm 
messages sent to the lists. Our defense against this is that the lists 
are set to block attachments. Our subscribers have seen some strange 
messages that came from virus-infected machines, but because the 
attachments are deleted, there is no danger to the subscribers. We can 
tolerate this.

Ballew,

Ballew Kinnaman wrote:
 >>If we ever have an incident of a forged
 >>editor address
 >
 > Using "if" rather than "when" may indicate
 > a possibly serious misunderstanding of the
 > level of spammer infection (and perversion)
 > of the legitimate Internet.
 >
 > Spammers have no compunctions about
 > civility and morality. Their "business model"
 > requires them to ignore civility and morality.
 >
 > If you leave the door open in ANY way, they
 > will impose their tripe on all available ears.

I have no illusions about the morality of spammers but they do respond 
to economic factors. Their business model is based on mass emailing and 
they won't spend a major effort (to find editor addresses) to reach 
small audiences.

I am concerned that some spammers may develop automated tools to seek 
out editor addresses so they can send spam to the lists. If this 
happens, I'll change all the lists to require confirmation of editor 
messages.

I also have no illusions about the "level of spammer infection (and 
perversion) of the legitimate Internet." Our lists are getting hammered 
by spam and we were having trouble getting people to server as 
moderators because they got all the spam messages to review. The option 
to require sender confirmation of messages from non-subscribers has been 
a life-saver.

                                     Peace,  Dan

=>  Daniel D. Wheeler - Education & Psychology, Univ. of Cincinnati
==>  Email: [log in to unmask]      URL: http://wheeler.uc.edu
===>  KIDLINK: http://www.kidlink.org