At 11:50 AM 6/10/97 -0400, Mike A. Harris wrote:
When a spammer uses the procmail list is their any way for the
owners of the procmail list machine to prosecute? What about
Unlikely for a number of reasons. For one, it isn't theft of services in
the _typical_ sense (wherein someone spoofs an SMTP server and sends out
spam from it, stealing the connectivity and bandwith of that server
directly), and as of yet, the only lawsuits I've really heard about against
spammers in this regard have been AOL and the such blocking Cyberpromo.
STOPPING spammers from posting to the list? How about only
accepting messages from authenticated members of the list?
Personally, I'm all for limiting posts to list subscribers. However, since
so many people have more than one account (and certainly don't want to have
to subscribe multiply to the list), there is likely to be a lot of
resistance to that -- people have got to change how they do things if it
becomes subscriber-only posing.
Self forgery (posting from one account as if you were at the other) is
trivial with the right mailer. Presumably as holders of multiple accounts
and being users of procmail, it shouldn't be too much of a technical leap
to have a forwarding recipe on the subscribed address to forward procmail
messages to your other address when so desired.
OTOH, if the listserv were so modified, it could have an "alternates"
address record for subscribers - something which isn't mailed to, but which
is accepted as a posting member of the list (and is associated with an
actual subscription account - you unsubscribe, and the associated records
are deleted too). Such a change would be nontrivial though.
---
Sean B. Straw / Professional Software Engineering
Post Box 2395 / San Rafael, CA 94912-2395