Re: Anti-Spam Option

[Nathan Sivin nsivin@xxxxxxxx]

Carl raises the question of making the list accessible only to
subscribers (AOTS). When I was running it, I was also running
four others, one of which we did decide to close in that sense.
It turns out to have a drawback.

Dumb little list processors are not aware of subscribers as human
beings with rich inner lives enmeshed in complex webs of
activity. To them, a subscriber is simply an email address,
nothing more. For instance, I can give my address not only as
listed at the end of this message, but as
nsivin@xxxxxxxx. If I do so, an AOTS list will soundly
reject it. If you borrow someone else's computer, or if you have
two email accounts and use the one you didn't subscribe from,
your message will not get through.

Those are the tradeoffs. AOTS is an inconvenience for some
subscribers, particularly those who join after the list is
changed and are not aware of the problem. It also generates a lot
of error messages for the list owner to deal with. It also forces
him to forward to the list queries from potential subscribers,
which is a certain amount of trouble. Unless spam is a frequent
nuisance, the total inconvenience in going to an AOTS list may be
greater. Of the five lists in which I was involved, the AOTS list
is still AOTS, and none of the others has chosen to become AOTS.

Let me add for Steve C. that most fairly up-to-date email
programs incorporate spam filters, which you can set to
automatically dump in the trash, without troubling you to delete
it, any message with "free" or "!!!" in the subject line. In
Netscape 4+, you use "Mail filters" under the "Edit" menu.

Cheers,
--
Nathan Sivin
History and Sociology of Science
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia PA 19104-6304
(215) 898-7454
nsivin@xxxxxxxx