Jeffrey Goldberg asked,
| I wonder how many people here have ever had a false complaint from a list
| member about being spammed.
I have. From my last list, four incidents come to mind.
One jerk asked to join (I maintained the membership rolls manually) who turned
out to be running an autoresponder that sent a "you filthy spammer" flame to
every piece of mail his filters didn't expect. So when I sent him the welcome
letter and got that back, I took him off, and he didn't like that either.
Another asked to join, and two days later accused me of being a spammer (as if
my discussion list were trying to sell her something) and accused me of
"buying [her] name."
Another had been a contributing member for years; suddenly he set up a
prove-you-love-me autoresponder that reacted to all unwhitelisted mail by
spitting back "if you're not a spammer, resend with my magic word in the
subject." A post went out with neither From: nor From_ nor Reply-To: pointing
to the list's submission address, but nonetheless that's where the
autoresponse was sent. That happened during the short time per week when the
list was normally unmoderated; luckily I was on line and doing some tweaking
and had manually flicked the moderation flag back on, so that didn't go to the
list. I told him that that one act had more than undone all he had done for
the list to that point and that he was "banned in perpetuity." He wrote back
saying I should let him know if I would reconsider -- apparently "in
perpetuity" didn't get through to him.
Then there was the one who wrote to me that he'd been thinking about unsubbing
for a while, and every post he'd received since he first entertained the idea
was retroactively classified as spam in his opinion.
There was also one bastard who asked to join but within days started sending
back whole digests to the list, adding "you're rude" and "you son of a bitch"
at the bottom; since that twit did not mention spam, I am not counting it as a
fifth case.
All of these are cases where the list itself was called spam: I'm not counting
those where one list member accused another of harvesting addresses to send
spam off-list. Most of those were true!
Follow-Ups:
References:
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