BLACK-L Archives

From: Erin Bradford <>
Subject: Spam on our mailing lists
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 1997 12:03:27 -0700 (PDT)

I am forwarding you all a piece of mail that I received today. As you can
see from the subject heading, we could possibly be headed towards the old
indiana server, but thankfully, rootsweb does have some protection against
this. Read on. By the way, I did do what was suggested by sending mail and
setting our list up so anyone who is not subscribed can post messages. If
this is a problem for you, please email me privately. Thank you.

-Erin

-------------------forwarded message-----------------------------
>It seems we've been found, sigh. Brian's too buried this week
>to research whether we can simply block these buzzards (it will
>be hard because of the way they forge headers), but if your
>list has been hit (or if it hasn't, for that matter), you can
>protect against spam by writing to and
>asking that foreign_submit be set to no for your list. That
>way, only subscribers will be able to post. And so far, the
>spammers don't seem inclined to subscribe first and post second.
>
>If your list is set up that way, and someone who isn't a subscriber
>tries to post, one of two things will happen. The default is that
>the message will be forwarded to the listowner, with an
>X-Diagnostic line buried in the message header that says, "Not
>on the accept list." The listowner can then forward it on to
>list, if so desired, or write to the poster and suggest they
>subscribe, or (in the case of our friend from Benchmark Painting)
>throw it away. The alternative is to write up a message for
>the "accept.txt" file for your list (send it to the listmaster
>address with an indication that it's the accept.txt file and for
>which list). If you do that, the rejected message =won't= be
>sent to you, and the accept.txt message will be sent to the address
>attempting to post.
>
>The downside of this approach is that some folks' addresses change
>with the phase of the moon. RAND has settled down, but it used
>to be fairly random whether the address or
> or or
>appeared on my messages. If I wrote from the one formally subscribed,
>my message would go through, but not if I wrote from one of the
>alternates.
>
>What I'm going to do today or over the weekend is tweak SmartList
>a bit, so that when the list is closed as described above, SmartList
>will allow addresses to post that are either subscribed to the
>list, or that are included on a separate "OK to post" list that
>the listowner can add to via the administrative page for the
>mailing list. (This option isn't in place now, I'll announce it
>once it is.) Coding up an X-Command to do this is probably too
>hard at this point, so this will only be available via the web page.
>You'll only need to add addresses that are not subscribed to your
>list but that you want to be able to post.
>
>Those of you who have list requests pending, this may delay them
>for a few days, sorry.
>
>Karen
>
>
Erin Bradford
Listowner for Black Mailing List
(at this address until August 20, 1997)
(at this address now and after August 20, 1997)
http://members.tripod.com/~Kshai/genealogy.html (my surnames)
http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Plains/6106/genlinks.html (+700 genealogy
links)

This thread:

• Spam on our mailing lists by Erin Bradford <>