ON Sun, Dec 10, 2000 at 01:22:23AM -0600, Austad, Jay wrote: > The list does not allow posts from addresses that are not subscribed, I just > tested it. These spammers are actually subscribing to the list. Tedious > for the spammers maybe, but if you think about how many people each list > address is worth, it's probably worth it for them. > > All they really need to do is grep for "\-list" in their lists of addresses > that they harvest and write a script that subscribes to all of them, and > have something that autoreplies to them. Not hard. > > ORBS or MAPS is probably the only real solution for this. Baseball bats to > the kneecaps might work also, but then you have to find out where they live. The list could be changed to submit a subscriber's first post for moderation and add the subscriber's address to a "known good" list if accepted. Since this list could be considered to have a number of "trusted" regulars who could be made moderators and a relatively low rate of posts from new subscribers, administration would be quite manageable. The approach would work until one of the moderators or regulars "defected" or the spammers started posting on-topic questions to the list before spamming it or posed as regulars before defecting. -- Michael