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