If I recall correctly, some time ago someone complained about receiving spam
at an address used only for sending email to netbsd lists.  I just received the
message below, indicating that sure enough, someone is gatewaying a local
newsgroup version of the mailing list onto DejaNews, apparently from idiom.com.
greywolf's mail seems to come through idiom.com (so I take it he's one of the
people discussed recently who isn't actually on the mailing list for various
reasons and thus couldn't post to current-users etc. if it were subscribers
only), so I take it that idiom.com isn't just doing this on behalf of spammers,
but perhaps they could be gently persuaded not to publish the netbsd "groups".



------- Forwarded Message

	by jfwhome.funhouse.com (8.8.8/8.8.7) with ESMTP id PAA13805
	for <jfw@jfwhome.funhouse.com>; Wed, 3 Dec 1997 15:56:25 -0500 (EST)
From: aqn@dev.tivoli.com
	by proxy.tivoli.com (8.8.6/8.8.6) with ESMTP id OAA07280;
	Wed, 3 Dec 1997 14:42:30 -0600 (CST)
	id OAA16083; Wed, 3 Dec 1997 14:53:24 -0600 (CST)
	id AA28102; Wed, 3 Dec 1997 14:53:10 -0600
Date: Wed, 3 Dec 1997 14:53:10 -0600
Message-Id: <9712032053.AA28102@thaison.dev.tivoli.com>
To: ghost@aladdin.com, jak@cetlink.net, jfw@jfwhome.funhouse.com,
        jkh@time.cdrom.com, owner-hts-users@htmlscript.com, tv@pobox.com
Subject: ----->  IMPORTANT MAILING LIST STUFF!  PLEASE READ!

  [ This email is also bcc'ed to a couple of other people. ]

  Hello all,

  This is VERY IMPORTANT.  This pertains to a mailing list that you
  are on.  Please read;  do NOT delete.  (Thanks in advance.)

  My name is Andy Nguyen.  I administer a mailing list for owners
  of VW GTI VR6 cars.  One of my subscribers recently alerted me to
  the fact that he saw the list's postings being mirrored in
  a newsgroup called mgate.gti-vr6.

  I went and looked on DejaNews.  Sure enough, DejaNews is carrying
  mgate.gti-vr6, as well as a bunch of what appear to be other
  mgate.XXX newsgroups mirroring other mailing lists.  I went through
  a sample of the posts to those lists and picked one person from
  each newsgroup/list who looks like s/he would be likely to have
  a surfeit of clues.  You guys are it.

  I am asking you  to please forward this email to the administrator(s)
  of your email list and alert him/her to this problem.

  The reason that I am doing this is because the gti-vr6 list's
  traffic is being redirected to a newsgroup without my (or any
  other subscriber's knowledge).  This causes the list's traffic
  to be in a Usenet newsgroup which are open to spammers looking
  to harvest email addresses.  It also means that the postings
  end up on DejaNews (not their fault), which is open to Web-
  crawling programs looking to harvest email addresses.

  I don't want my subscribers to have to expose themselves to
  spammers when they post to my list.  I suspect you (and other
  subscribers on your list) would not want that either.

  Now on to more practical things:

  The headers of the mgate.XXX postings all have one thing in common:
  they all came from news.idiom.com.  I looked in my subscribers
  list, and guess what?  There is exactly one subscriber  from
  idiom.com, and it's "gti-vr6-local@idiom.com"!  Guess who's gonna
  get unsubscribed from my mailing list?!  (And also guess who's
  gonna get a few thousand (anonymous) spam emails of all of the
  postings to misc.test?!  |-)

  I am asking you  to please forward this email to the administrator(s)
  of your email list and alert him/her to this problem.

  Oh, here are the mgate.XXX newsgroups (I know you can look on
  DejaNews and find this out;  just thought I would save you
  some time):

	mgate.freebsd.questions
	mgate.freebsd.chat
	mgate.freebsd.current
	mgate.freebsd.hackers
	mgate.fsb
	mgate.gti-vr6
	mgate.htmlscript.users
	mgate.netbsd.current-users
	mgate.netbsd.i386
	mgate.win95-l

- --
Andy Nguyen \ aqn@tivoli.com \ Tivoli Systems, Austin, TX \ 512.436.8229
        Ave, XTela, morituri te salutamus.

------- End of Forwarded Message