On Sun, 14 Sep 1997, Mason Loring Bliss wrote:

> 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.

I agree that this is a good method, but the most recent left no such
option.  I don't know if anybody else noticed this, but (and this is what
REALLY offended me) the "from:" address was port-mac68k@netbsd.ORG, as was
the "to:" address.  Kinda rude, if you ask me.  Moreover, I think that
constitutes fraud, and I have to wonder if we want to do anything about
it.  (Or, for that matter, if we CAN do anything about it.  I'm not sure
of the subtleties involved, or how we might track down the twits in
question...)

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

I agree, but it's rather difficult when we don't know what the source
is...

	-Seth Miller