I wanted to stay out of the quarterly debate on spam because all
of the possible wisdom on the topic is already in the archives 10 ways
from Sunday, but my inbox is being flooded by more mail about the spam
than the actual spam, so I will recycle some words. Please don't send
me any more personal mail on the spam and the Yahoo! ads, etc. :-)

I cannot make the Yahoo! ads go away (except by shelling out cash,
see later); as a media company, they are in business to make money
for their shareholders, and media companies make money by selling
advertising, not letting us use their resources for free. Either
send complaints to Yahoo! directly, or consider some of the points
below ... (but a better use of time may be to work on clues or
something -- I did not enjoy writing the following, and cannot
imagine who would enjoy reading it ...)

Firstly, if someone has a recommendation for a better service than
Yahoo!, feel free to speak up, and we can decide as a community.
FWIW, I think the Microsoft service (I believe it is called "listbot")
is pretty lame. I have not investigated other services.

Now, there are two separate issues. The Yahoo! generated advertising,
and the "spam". The "spam" is off-topic e-mail sent by non-list members
trying to get you to buy something, etc. The Yahoo! generated advertising
is ads appended to on-topic e-mails sent by list members, or imbedded in
the messages on the web site. Some people sometimes get the two confused.
Yahoo! Inc, is not sending "spam" to the list, but _is_ appending ads.

-------------
external spam
-------------

The reason the list receives spam from external sources is that --

a) the list has been around for a long time (meaning it has been mined and
is in spammers' databases)
b) non-members are permitted to post
c) the list is not moderated

a) and c) are not negotiable. The historical reason for b) is that that
is the way the old timers wanted it. It has the advantage of "openness",
meaning people could post letterbox clues without "joining", dealing
with "members only" vibes, and other noise like "registration". The old
timers thought this was a Good Thing. I imagine the old timers still
feel this way, I do anyway. But like everything else, it is a tradeoff.
b) can be changed by a supermajority vote of the list. Changing b) will
eliminate external spammers unsophisticated enough to join the list before
spamming. I don't know how sophisticated they are; there are more
important things for me to thing about ... If you think the spam is more
of a negative than the openness is a positive, make that point and start
a poll if you want.

Other ways to deal with external spam is to run modern operating systems
like Linux (or Unix) (where you can use procmail, for example), or run
modern e-mail programs with sophisticated filtering capability. Getting
into this is too much; there are plenty resources on these and other
spam mitigating techniques elsewhere on the 'net. Some ISPs offer spam
filtering as a service. Find one of these ISPs if you want.

The best defense is to just delete it. It is simply so much easier than
all this blather ... (Yes there is an argument against this attitude, but
IMO that argument is not tenable). I could have deleted 1000 spams in the
time it took to write this drivel ...

--------------------
Yahoo! generated ads
--------------------

The last time I checked, and that was a _long_ time ago, you could pay
$48/year and make all the Yahoo! generated ads go away. I imagine that
would apply to the new ads in the messages on the web site, though I
do not know that. If someone wants to pass the hat and pay the rent,
feel free.

Otherwise, the Yahoo! generated advertising can be divided into 2
categories -
a) That which is attached to e-mails
b) That which appears when reading mail on the web

The ways to deal with a) are again, to run Linux and use procmail to get
rid of them (I do this and it works well), or to pony up the $48. At
one time (and perhaps you still can) you could trick the Yahoo! mailer
into not appending them by putting certain text in your message, but
trying to get everyone on the list to do that is not feasible.

And a quick observation on the ads Yahoo! puts in the mail. If you send
mail as plain text, it appends a relatively unobtrusive plain text ad.
If you send mail as html, it appends a honkin' mombo graphic that takes
decades to download from their ad server. So send mail as plain text
(This is good list etiquette anyway, but again, getting everyone to do
this is a lost cause; I've seen it attempted on other lists).

As for the honkin' ads Yahoo! puts when reading mail on the web, that
is a tough one. Aside from the obvious don't read on the web, the obvious
stuff like turning off java and images in the browers did not work well
(turning off images still left a big space where the ad would go, but
it did speed up the download). The only defense (besides paying), seems
to be to pre-process the html sent from Yahoo!, and that is beyond the
ken of most users, unfortunately. Perhaps there are browers out there
that do it, I dunno.

Cheers
Randy
List Manager