---Mark Salamon <mark@sixdegrees.com> wrote:

Thanks for the reply. I have now received about 10 such replies. We will take them to heart, remove the cypherpunks and attempt to deal with the mailing list issue in an intelligent way.

And thanks, but we have enough magazine subscriptions already. :)

Mark

Bart Troyan wrote:

...

OK, here's what happened. Someone signed up for sixdegrees using one or more of the cypherpunks addresses as their address, either deliberately in order to cause problems like this, or accidentally, not realizing what would happen.

The real-world analogy would be for me and all my friends to get a bunch of magazines, rip out all those postage-paid subscription flaps, and fill out your name and address on each of them, then you'd have unwanted trial subscriptions to lots and lots of magazines.

hmmmm... MacroView 90 William Street, Suite 301 New York, NY 10038

Wouldn't that suck? Can you imagine if 1000 people did that to you all the same day? (this is *not* a threat, just an example). You'd have bags and bags of zines and bills coming in daily...

As I am sure you are aware, the net makes it REALLY EASY to screw someone over like that, by signing them up for all sorts of things with little effort. Even if you remove all the cypherpunks addresses, someone can come along and do it again. There must be a permanent solution...how about hardcoding a block on signing up with an address containing the string "cypherpunks" in your email software? Why should thousands of us on cypherpunks all have to do our own filtering to delete everything from @sixdegrees.com and still have to waste all that bandwidth when one site is the source of all of it, and it could be eradicated with a simple programming change?

I assure you this is not the last time you'll see this problem occur--there are thousands of mailing lists out there, and lots of vindictive former subscribers for each one that would love to annoy everyone on the list for a while... and signing a list up for sixdegrees does the trick quite efficiently.

-Bart

Mark Salamon wrote:

...

What is confusing to me is that the email you received from sixdegrees (with the subject: Harald Fragner) is one that would be sent ONLY to a CONFIRMED sixdegrees user. That means that once upon a time, whether you remember or not, you joined sixdegrees (as have over 1,000,000 people to date). It also appears that you listed Harald Fragner as a