Please, please, please, let's take discussion of what to do about spam on amanda-users offline.
It does nobody any good to debate dealing with spam on the list and it's unquestionably off-topic as much as the spam itself is. If it will make people feel better, I'll setup an unmoderated open list called [EMAIL PROTECTED] to give you a place to vent about it. To be frank, the list is not a democracy and it does no good to debate the topic here, especially since I (the guy who hosts the lists) do not read amanda-users that closely these days (it's as time permits but it's low on my list -- my day job is too consuming). All it's accomplishing is aggrevating folks. Given that over 50% of messages to amanda-users come from non-subscribers (I've done occasional spot checks of this over the past five or so years I've run amanda-users), it seems inappropriate to me to restrict it to non-subscribers. There are many other philosophies on this point and we can debate it again and again, but that won't likely change anything. All that having been said, (and with this message, I've probably already annoyed a bunch of people who will be sending unsubscription requests in response to what they think is an unreasonable attitude :-) I have some thoughts on how to deal with the spam better, and will likely be dropping something into place that interacts with spamassassin to make non-subscribers whose messages cross it's thresholds to have to manually acknowledge that they meant to send it. (similar in theory to the auth mechanisms in place with majordomo when you describe). This will likely not happen until at least October when I expect spare cycles to write up and test the scripts to do this. If someone is aware of something out there that already exists that does something along those lines please send mail to be privately and it will likely get done a lot faster. If you'd like to volunteer to write such a beast, please let me know privately. If you'd like to debate this matter with the people right now who can affect any change whatsoever, please direct it at [EMAIL PROTECTED] and not to the mailing list. However, that's most likely going to just delay implementation of the above since I'll be spending more time dealing with discussing what to do than actually doing. :-) please, please please do not reply to this message including the list and let's get the messages back to discussions about amanda. -Todd