Tom Neff wrote:
>
> I understand that there is a legitimate need (especially but not only in
> Egroups's eyes) for legitimate listowners to be able to PORT their lists
> over to Egroups from another service or software package. The trick is how
> to distinguish this from spammers doing mass subscribes of victims. I have
> a few suggestions for Egroups to consider.
>
> One suggestion is that the number of LEGITIMATE wholesale list migrations to
> Egroups from elsewhere, per day, could not be very large. A customer
> service representative inspecting the transaction would probably have very
> little difficulty telling the difference between, say, Model-Rockets-L
> changing homes, versus SCHWING-XXX DIET SUPPLEMENT trying to add 9,000
> people from AOL. So you tell list owners that bulk subscribes take a day to
> process, and you vet them before saying yes. If you have any doubts you
> request further verification.
>
That is exactly how things are supposed to work right now. Bulk list
transfers are reviewed by a human before they are done. Unfortunately,
in this particular case, a list transfer was approved that should not
have been.
> Another suggestion is that Egroups should take care to "salt" the web with
> telltale marker email addresses (which are never disclosed), the appearance
> of any one of which in a bulk subscribe becomes prima facie evidence of a
> rip job.
>
That's an excellent suggestion. I will make a note of it.
> A third suggestion is that, for any given list, mass migrations are RARE.
> Therefore it would be reasonable, if a bulk subscribe passes all other
> kosherness tests, to send an OPT-IN message - containing NO material written
> by the list manager whatsoever beyond the name of the list and the manager -
> to each address in the bulk subscribe list, requesting a mailed or webbed
> confirm before their subscription takes effect. Now, THIS message could
> contain as one of the possible responses "no, and never send me one of these
> opt-ins again either." That would cover the abuse case where you find
> yourself saying no-thanks to eight opt-ins a week. Remember that any
> LEGITIMATE list owner who plans to migrate her or his list to Egroups has
> ample opportunity beforehand to tell all the members, ON THE OLD LIST, what
> is happening and what they need to do to make sure they're included in the
> move. (In fact, Egroups could provide a standard form of this announcement
> for cut+paste by list managers as part of a "Migration Kit.")
>
There have been times since we've been on-line that we've completely
disabled the ability to add people directly to lists. Our list managers
complained loudly and often. There are many legitimate reasons why a
list owner needs to directly add an email address or two at a time to a
list. The web site allows list owners to do this. In the case of moving
a list over from another service, in our experience, most list owners
will not do it if it requires the users to re-confirm their
subscriptions. So the procedure we have in place now is our attempt to
balance the need of our list owners to directly transfer a list with our
need to make sure that abuses don't happen. The list owner sends us the
list of email addresses, one of our support staff does various
verification checks to make sure the previous list as it existed outside
of our service was legit, and if it checks out, we do the bulk add.
I'd like to also point out that in normal circumstances, users have to
reply to a confirmation email before they are subscribed to any
ONElist/eGroups lists.
> I hope Egroups is still reading this. Maybe I'll Cc that apologizing person
> as well.
>
I've been on this list since before I started ONElist back in 1997(I've
been on various mailing lists since 1988). It's very important that as a
company and as a web service, we are good netizens. That's why we
monitor lists like this. That's also why we have an extensive customer
support group which tries to answer all support email within an average
of 4 hours(the eGroups side of the company is currently a bit slower in
responses, but we're working on it).
I'll be the first to admit that we've sometimes made mistakes. But they
are honest mistakes, and I think as a whole we've done a good job
helping our now 15 million users enjoy the power of group communication
through mailing lists. But we're always striving to be better.
If anyone has any questions, please feel free to email myself or Kate
Shambarger, Director of Customer Support, at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Thanks,
Mark
