hmm. mozilla-general(_at_)mozilla(_dot_)org is a mailing list that was 99%
spam for
many *years*; non-subscriber posting was permitted right until the last
month, January of this year. take a look at the 1325 spams it received in
that month:
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=mozilla-general&r=1&b=200401&w=2
I see no real mail at all, so I think it's a reasonable assmption that
nobody was subscribed to it, or at the least the subscribers had
procmailed it to /dev/null. I don't care what junk is sent to a list that
nobody reads.
I hear the GNU lists were in a similar situation until about a year ago.
They're not a good example of much of anything other than that
sufficiently strong political beliefs can make otherwise smart people do
really stupid things. John Gilmore's adamant insistence on leaving his
MTA as an open relay has gotten him kicked off all the ISPs he's used.
I subscribed to the GNU flex list for a while which was about 99.8% spam.
It was pretty clear that nobody was reading it since the few real posts
didn't get responses.
Given how easy it would be to have switched that to subscriber posting
only, I don't think your conclusion follows in all cases.
On the net, I don't think anything follows in all cases. But it's really
hard to think of any lists that have real mail and a significant amount of
spam mixed in.
Regards,
John Levine, johnl(_at_)iecc(_dot_)com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet
for Dummies",
Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://iecc.com/johnl, Mayor
"I dropped the toothpaste", said Tom, crestfallenly.