Thanks for the vote of confidence Frank. I definitely did not send these messages and neither did the several other people from who these message claim to appear. This is a rare example of a spam that intelligently targets mailing lists by impersonating mailing list members.
It is very awkward to automate mailing address moderation other than by the email address (address portion only) of the sender. This is about the only reliable constant that you can expect the sender to update when it does indeed change. Of course the result is that this sort of thing can happen.
In the past the risk has been acceptable, as can be seen by the extremely low level of spam that has come through on this list previously. I greatly hope that this is a fluke and that it will not repeat with signicant frequency. Any other solution of which I'm aware will be a significant annoyance for someone; in fact if this sort of spam becomes common I predict that this will be the death of the most well known mailing lists and we will have to switch to some system (web forum, etc) where true authentication is required.
Ken
On Sun, 2009-01-25 at 21:56 +0200, Frank Shearar wrote:
"Séverin Lemaignan" skadge@gmail.com writes:
Is it possible to remove these aliases ("Lawrence Auster ken@kencausey.com and Ron Teitelbaum Ron@usmedrec.com) from these mailling lists?
(Note that "Lawrence Auster" isn't "Ken Causey", first of all.)
Yeah that, or we could remember that those two email addresses belong to two pillars of our community. Assuming that the mails even came from their computers, it's rather more likely their machines have been compromised than that they turned, er, rabid.
frank