list questions

[Harald Barth]

This is a bit meta, but I suppose more that Brian do want to know what
is going on. Brian's question was:

> Okay what's the difference between arla-drinkers@ and arla-drinkers-list@ ?
> Is it the same set of people subscribed to both?

The arla-drinkers list i handled by majordomo and the *-list one is an
_internal_ alias that you should never see. In fact, all the
arla-drinkers mail is expanded by using the *-list alias without you
taking notice. Unfortunately, some people in the spam business seem to
have figured out that you can mail directly to the *-list expander
without going through majordomo. That is bad because majordomo
includes some spam prevention which the posting to *-list circumvents.

So what to do about it? We should figure out how to prevent mailings
from other than majordomo (or 127.0.0.1) to the *-list aliases. This
has not been achieved yet due to the massive frustration that can be
involved when dealing with sendmail and sendmail.cf. One easier way
out might be to replace *-list with *-somethingelse-I-wont-tell-you
and hope the spammers won't find out soon. Trust me, we are as annoyed
as you are and thinking about a possible solution to this.

If you have some ideas and suggestions how to fix this, your`re welcome 
with suggestions to staff at ...

Harald.