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mystery subscribers

``` I received at least thirty replies to my query about mystery subscriptions on RRE. Here is a summary of the issues that various people raised.

(1) Many people suggested that the problem was simply that RRE messages were getting forwarded, and the forwardee didn't understand what was happening. This does happen quite a lot, not least because many mail headers are very unclear about forwarding. But in fact most of the people who complained to me were in fact on the mailing list.

(2) Several people pointed out the new style of Internet mail-bombing, which some referred to as "list-bombing": bomb someone by forging subscriptions to numerous mailing lists. Two main motives have mentioned: political disagreement, often but not always with regard to Internet issues like censorship (apparently this tactic is being practiced by dunderheads on both the left and the right); and spam (many spammers have apparently gotten the list-bombing treatment). You might recall the message about mail-bombing that I circulated from the White House (one of many victims); one loser writing from a US military address denounced this message as deepest arrogance, having interpreted it as a declaration that no e-mail to the White House is ever read by anybody important. You can't win, it seems.

(3) List-bombing, however, does not seem to be the only phenomenon here. Only a few of the people who complained to me mentioned other mailing lists, and I think that victims of list-bombing are much more likely to change to a new account than to try unwinding all of their bogus subscriptions. Nobody seconded my speculation of a demon generating subscriptions in a less systematic, more random or sporadic way, but the problems seems much too common to be happening purely by hand.

(4) One particularly depressing point, mentioned by a few people, is that some Web browsers make it very easy to forge mail by simply typing in the victim's e-mail address when the browser starts up. For example, the Web browsers on the Macs in the undergraduate lab where I teach always start up by asking for a name and e-mail address, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to think to type in someone else's information.

(5) Listserv has an option whereby the putative subscriber must reconfirm a subscription by replying to an automatically generated message. I've seen this feature occasionally for a long time; I believe it originated to solve the much more pervasive problem of e-mail messages that are badly formed, or that come from badly configured machines, or that otherwise cannot be replied to. But it's also a way to screen out forgeries. It sounds like we may need to consider implementing such a thing here too -- in our abundant spare time.

Thanks a lot to everyone who wrote.

Phil ```

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