Linux Porting Alliance

[michael d hoskins]

<spam about spam>
I agree about a name change.  Perhaps the name shouldn't be made
"public" on the website:  http://www.kclug.org/list.shtml

The "subscribe kclug" gives it away.  You just add two and two together,
since the domain is kclug.org and the listserve name is kclug:
kclug at kclug.org  Now, if I'm a spammer, I just start sending to that
address, and Majordomo obliges.  If spammers trade email addresses, and
then tell two of their friends, and they tell two of their friends....

I think a form needs to be filled out on the web site that does the
subscribing behind the scenes for you, perhaps a CGI or PHP script, so
that the name is not made public.  This pretty much "entitles" the
person signing up for the list to join in and read the emails, until
they unsubscribe, themselves.  The form could contain requests for
additional info and a warning about spamming our list.

This does help to get rid of the occasional "screen scraper" spam.
These days, automated jobs/agents are beginning to traverse websites in
search of email addresses.  Any time you have a mailto:user at domain.com
or just a user at domain.com entry, it can fall victim.  A simple
additional rule for subscribe blah and a quick reference to the domain
of the web page can have the same results.  Some people are starting to
alter their email addresses, so that only human beings can decipher
them....

In our case, people are probably just going to a page like
http://www2.linuxjournal.com/cgi-bin/frames.pl/lr-toc.html and then they
visit http://www.kclug.org/list.shtml and voila.

If we go "form only," we need to definitely change the name of the list,
as well as majordomo at kclug.org, if possible.  Just by sending "lists" in
the message body of majordomo at kclug.org gives all lists.  By sending
"who kclug" to the same address gives us the subscribers.  (These two
commands assume the features are turned on.  I hope they are not.)

If we go "form only," as above, don't put information on the web page,
change the name of our list, change the name of majordomo at kclug.org, and
only allow subscribers to view archives, then only list users can really
give out our info, meaning that we can at least narrow the search for
spammers.

I don't think we have root access to the server.  We could change to
another list serve or go with some web-based product for posting.

We could restrict it down to subscribers only, but then have a web page
that lets us post with a username and password, to help those with
alternate email addresses.

Back to some information I sent long ago about an incoming list and an
outgoing list:
http://www.greatcircle.com/majordomo/majordomo-faq.html#3.13  I remember
now how I did this at JCCC.  I did have two lists, one a list of valid
posters, another a list of valid recipients of the list sent by the
posters.  Then I turned on restrict-post, all detailed in the above web
page from greatcircle.com:
"2.the restrict_post header can be extended.

The typical way to do #2 is to set restrict_post to:

mylist:mylist-nomail

Then, create a configuration file and password for
"mylist-nomail", but DO NOT create any aliases. (If you use something
like mj_build_aliases, then don't set the owner)

The moderator, or subscribers may then subscribe themselves to
this second list. Subscribers to the -nomail list will then be allowed
to post to the first list, but won't receive duplicate copies of the
first list."

</spam about spam>

-----Original Message-----
From: watts [mailto:watts at jayhawks.net]
Sent: Saturday, April 08, 2000 2:26 AM
To: kclug
Cc: watts
Subject: Re: kclug - Linux Porting Alliance

On Sat, 8 Apr 2000, Cynthia Peters wrote:

> e-Infochips is an Organization, with primary focus in

Hehe, this is getting funny.  I've gotten like 20 different Linux spam
messages in the last couple of months -- want to know what the punchline
is?  Most of them have X-Mailer: tags from Windows.

All humor aside, I think that the mail admin needs to change the name of
the mailing list ASAP and leave this one as the contact address.

May I suggest kclug-l at kclug.org?  As much as I enjoy lurking around
here,
the spam is getting really old.

J.

o-----------------------------------o
| Jeffrey Watts                     |
| watts at jayhawks.net            o-------------------------------------o
| Systems Programmer          |  [On going to war over religion]    |
| Sprint - Systems Management   | "You're basically killing each      |
o-------------------------------|  other to see who's got the better  |
|  imaginary friend."                 |
|  -- Rich Jeni                       |
o-------------------------------------o