> Six months ago this list changed providers. Since then it
> averages two new subscribers a month. (But that's another story,
> not relevant to this query.)
>
> Suddenly 26 subscribes appeared within 14 days, taking our
> subscriber list from a stable 455 to 480 in 2 weeks. Clusters of
> unusual subscriptions began arriving, starting 10 Feb 98. All
> were identical in the following respects:
I can offer three possible theories, some of which you've probably already
worked out on your own:
1. Some person or group of people is deliberately trying to take over your
list, for reasons relating to the charter of your list.
2. Information about your list has appeared on some 3rd party source that is
reaching a lot of potential subscribers. Based on the names you provided,
I would discount this possibility, but not 100%. A variation on this
is that some 3rd party web subscription 'service' has added your list to
its collection of lists you can subscribe to from a web interface. For
the most part, such aids are not very helpful to me, very few of the
subscribers I _want_ to reach arrive through such means. However, I once
had over 100 new subscribers in a 3 day period, based on a magazine
article about one of my lists, so outside publicity isn't always bad.
3. You are being targed by a group that harrasses e-mail lists just to be
a pain in the net. I've been bothered by such a group once or twice
myself, sometimes they go away sometimes they don't. (There's a similar
group that takes great pleasure it taking over and ruining USENET
newsgroups.) This can also be as innocuous as a bunch of high school
kids that have discovered the Internet and your list, not that this makes
it any less of a pain to deal with.
Two possible actions:
1. Go to a magic cookie response to finalize subscriptions. Most list
software offers this capability either in the base product or as an
add on. This not only keeps a lot of spammers out, it gets rid of most
not-serious lookie loos, too. (And it keeps out many of the terminally
clueless.)
2. If your software/provider maintains the full text and headers of
subscription requests, you can look at the subscriptions in depth to
see if there are any patterns beyond what you've already reported.
(Received-By headers are often useful in this regard.)
--
Mike Nolan
References:
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