That is a good idea, but how long will it take for spammers to start forging valid addresses? I was very surprised to get an email last month from a list owner telling me that my "submission" had been rejected because I wasn't a subscriber. My purported message was attached, and it was porn spam sent out under my name. If spammers are now forging addresses, it won't take them long to associate particular forged addresses with particular mailing lists.

But even if white-listing doesn't work in the long run, it will provide some immediate relief.

About the changing-address problem, where you might be abc@def.xyz.com one week and abc@qrs.xyz.com the next: some mail list programs are set up to ignore everything before the second-level name, so that def.xyz.com, qrs.xyz.com, and xyz.com are all treated identically. That wouldn't help if your address went from abc@hcfa.gov to abc@cms.gov, but we can't solve every problem at once. I have no problem with interim solutions as long as they don't eliminate other future, better, solutions.

-- JackHamilton@FirstHealth.com Manager, Technical Development METRICS Department, First Health West Sacramento, California USA

>>> "Mark Moran" <mark.k.moran@CENSUS.GOV> 10/16/2002 8:51 AM >>> > For example, LISTSERV does allow a list to be configured so that subscribers' posts go > through automatically while others are screened by a moderator.

Howard's suggestion makes a lot of sense to me!

Mark Moran