[Boston-video] fending off spam and scam messages on boston-video list

[Gary S. Trujillo]

Regarding the scam posting to this list this evening:

"update at ebay.com" wrote:
>
> ...According to our site policy you will have to confirm...

I suggest that the list administrator might think about limiting the
ability to post to the list to subscribers, so that we don't have to
fend off or deal with this sort of nuisance, which is sent out by
criminals trying to harvest information from actual eBay members who
are naiive enough to not recognize the ploy for what it is.  (The
right thing to do with such messages is to send them, including their
headers, to the address "spoof at ebay.com" so that the eBay people can
track down and attempt to put these crooks out of business.  (This
particular piece of spam seems to have come (according to information
found in the message header) from the University of Utah.)

One real giveaway, for those who don't realize that eBay never sends
such solicitations for information from its subscribers, is the non-
grammatical expression "Never share your eBay password to anyone!" -
which a native speaker of English would never say or write, methinks.

While I'm on the subject, in answer to Andrew's recent question about
how to know who is on the list, the subscribers' addresses are available
at:

  http://lists.indymedia.org/mailman/roster/boston-video

Again, I suggest to the administrator that the list be configured such
that this list of subscribers is available only to subscribers (or
perhaps only to the administrator if we want to prevent someone from
joining the list just to harvest addresses).

BTW, I see from the page whose URL I've just mentioned that the list
administrator is "tangle7<at>yahoo.com" - which I believe belongs to
Tiffa, who I would be glad to help if asked (I administer some mailman-
based lists myself, and can thus advise on how to set various options).
Is there any good reason we would not want to limit the ability to
post to the list to subscribers, which would also free us of having to
deal with ads for professional clogs and real estate in the Maltese
Islands or wherever??

I'll take care of informing eBay about this pernicious scam message.
I suspect they have heard about it already, but "it never hurts..."

Gary