On 9/13/97 at 7:45 PM -0400, you wrote:

> As it currently stands, the open list policy only hurts the people who are
> subscribed to it and have to receive off topic mail.

Deleting mail is pretty easy to do, and we don't get commercial email all
that often. It *is* offensive, but closing the list is a bandaid solution.
The proper solutions are:

1) Criminalize unsolicited commercial email. Unsolicited commercial
facsimile transmissions are illegal, as far as I know, so there's precedent.

2) Contact the administrators of the machines who produced the spam, and
the administrators of the machines to whom THEY are connected. The folks
who run the major systems out there aren't too different from us. If I
were, for example, in a position of power at AlterNet, and a place that was
leasing a line from me was essentially a spamming service, I'd discontinue
their service. I think most places have policies that prohibit various
sorts of net.abuse.

Personally, whenever I receive UCE, I take a moment to look at the headers
and write to the appropriate postmasters. I almost always get a reply back
that says that the systems in question don't tolerate spam and have already
expunged the account in question.

Closing the list is escalation, and implied acceptance of the existence of
UCE. Cutting off spam at the source is resolution.

--
        Mason Loring Bliss    /\    mason@acheron.middleboro.ma.us
     www.webtrek.com/mason   /()\   awake ? sleep() : dream();
<barbaric>YAWP!</barbaric>  /    \  Squeak to me of love!