Knee-Jerk Over-Reaction! [Was Re:Grr!]

[Robi Karp]

Phil McCrea wrote:

 : Why don't you set up 'link' so that only subscribers can post to it. It
 : will spare us the pain of getting spam mail from turkeys like this! What
 : about their form in thanking an entire list for an 'enquiry'!

To which Tony, as list-owner, replied:

 : When I figure out how to (it wasn't in the documentation I originally had)
 : in the new documentation I'll see if I can or can get the sysadmin to do it
 : if I can't.
 : 
 : The catch will be that if I do this nobody will be able to post from an
 : address other than the one from which they subscribed and if they try their
 : message will probably bounce to me for approval which will delay the
 : message getting to the list.

And Roger Clarke followed up to that with:

 : So a couple of wincey spams are about to cause a fundamental change
 : in what has been one of the most open-yet-responsible e-lists on
 : the net!

There are other alternatives as well.  The Majordomo software that is
used by link can be configured to reject messages with particular
patterns (regexps) in the body or the header.  A set of rules could be
put together to catch the most obvious of spams.  Strings like "$$$",
for example, could be filtered out, or even passed to Tony for an ok.
And, as Roger says, we could probably live with the rest of them.

BTW: Roger, nice, readable, message layout idea.

- Robi