Rick - 1) Yup, I agree with you that some smarter spammers may try to circumvent whatever measures are implemented, but 2) Machines could automatically implement some rules before exploding, forwarding, etc. and reduce the "subscribe me" and flagrant spamming. Messages to the uninitiated culprits would as a side effect help to educate. 3) Some good would come from the existence of #2. Bill

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I personally think slightly smarter exploders might go a long way. For example: ... 2) an exploder that "suspends" messages with more than, say 6 lists and newsgroups, and notifies the sender. If the sender is not a real address, it automatically is purged.

But wouldn't a spammer just defeat this measure by using a shell script, say. Instead of sending one message to n lists, a script could easily send n messages each addressed to a single list.

Rick Boivie rboivie@vnet.ibm.com