🚀 go-pugleaf

On Fri, 26 May 1995 11:44:41 -0600 James Pawley said:
>>[You pathetic morons.  Buy my stuff.  Send me money.  Now.]
>
>I have been active on the net since I was a graduate student in the
>early 80s.  One of the things that I have noticed in the past year
>of so, since the hype about the "information highway" started, is
>that unscrupulous and inconsiderate companies are increasingly
>insistent on spamming multiple lists with unsolicited and
>unwelcome advertisements.  As with the case of this advertisement,
>the intrusions has nothing to do with the subject of the list.
>
>While this irritates me, I am equally opposed to the explicit
>censorship of a moderated group (at least for a discussion group).
>It is thus the "right" of these people to post to unmoderated
>groups of their choice, however inappropriate.
>
>It is also, however, our right to point out to these people
>and their carriers that these posts are inappropriate, and that
>they may well do as much commercial harm as good.
>
>Certainly, I will never buy a product from Netnews or
>Your Lifetime Health Planner, if I can avoid it.  Moreover,
>I can't help but wonder if the American.edu  knows that
>its services are being used for commercial spamming.
>
>I suggest that the readers of this list let Netnews, AMERICAN.EDU,
> and Your Lifetime Health Planner know how you feel, but dropping them one
>or a few notes to that effect.  You might send a note to
>NETNEWS@AMERICAN.EDU, and to the postmaster@AMERICAN.EDU.

For the last few years The American University has been providing a
gateway service between about 350 electronic mailing lists and usenet
newsgroups (most in the bit.* hierarchy). We have donated the resources
need to perform this service as a contribution to the networking
community.

The gateway passes all posts from the newsgroup to the mailing list and
from the mailing list to the newsgroup. This allows people to read from
and post to mailing lists using a "news reader" instead of having the
mail arrive intermixed with their incoming personal e-mail. It also
allows those who do not have access to news to read from and post to a
newsgroup in which they have an interest. The gateway passes all posts
without examining their contents. In all cases the gateways were
established at the request of or with the permission of the list owners.

From time to time someone has posted an advertisement to a large number
of newsgroups -- including those for which we provide this gateway
service. These posts are then sent to the mailing list associated with
the newsgroup. Also from time to time someone has posted an advertisement
to a large number of mailing lists, and the gateway again has done its
job and posted these messages to the newsgroups associated with these
mailing lists. These "spam" messages almost always result in hundreds of
complaints to the postmaster account at our site. Even worse, our mail
software appends our domain name to badly constructed e-mail addresses --
making it look like the person who posted the "spam" message is one of
our users -- or the listserv detects the incorrect e-mail address and
instead uses the gateway's address -- making it look like the gateway
originated the post.

The amount of time dealing with the peripheral issues related to the
gateways has simply gotten out of hand. We have not minded providing
the machine resources for the gateway service -- most of the posts were
coming to our Listserv and/or news server anyway -- and the time needed
to set up the gateways has been minimal. However I cannot afford to spend
vast amounts of time dealing with complaints every time a "spam" occurs
-- on top of the fact that for providing a service to the networking
community we appear to be a site which is causing trouble for the
network.

Frankly, there seems to be no good way to provide a transparent gateway
service between mailing lists and newsgroups in such a way as to prevent
spams. It doesn't matter if the newsgroup is moderated or the mailing
list is protected (eg, set Send=Private). The spammers put in Approved
tags in their posts so they are accepted in moderated newsgroups, and
since the gateway is both subscribed to the list and refered to in the
post's headers the post is accepted for protected mailing lists.

We are at this point considering our options. We are looking into moving
the gateways to a unix machine and both suppressing the appending of our
domain name to incorrect addresses, as well as pointing back to the
original poster or the list in the Return-Path field. Our only other
alternative will be to stop providing the gateway service. Lists which
cannot find an alternative gateway site would then have their associated
newsgroups rmgroup'ed. We recognize this may effectively close down the
bit.* hierarchy so we would prefer to get the first solution -- that of
masking the gateway's address -- working.

With regards to the current spam, it appears to be a Cantor & Spiegel
job. These are the two lawyers who have formed a company to generate
spams. You can complain the them, but I doubt it will do any good as they
fully intended to do this.

Jim McIntosh (jim@american.edu)
The American University
Washington DC 20016-8019 USA