To clarify a bit, what katydid means is that GEN-SLAVIC is getting messages posted to the Usenet group soc.genealogy.slavic. Most of the soc.genealogy.* groups are gated to/from a mailing list. There is a no spam setting for GEN-SLAVIC (and the other genealogy mailing lists) which is turned on and Rootsweb effectively weeds spam to the mailing lists from the Usenet groups. The odd one does make it through to the list. If you have a post office address for very long, you are going to get junk mail from a variety of sources. And you ignore it. Margaret Sheremata [email protected] GEN-SLAVIC Listowner On Wed, 15 Jul 1998, katydid wrote: > the reason you get spam etc on this list as well as GenIre and any others gatewayed > with a newsgroup is that _it is an open list_ and anyone can post to it, and > spammers and others take advantage of it. > > I own two lists for Irish research and both are "closed" lists , as are most > rootsweb lists for just that reason, you don't get spammed (as only subscribers can > post and receive messages) and you don't get a lot of , shall we be kind and say > unstable, people just coming on to start trouble. > > This is why I rarely post to GenIre or GenSlavic --- because another feature of this > is that spammers read these newsgroups and collect email addresses of people and add > them to databases to send to. I have had this new address for 2 months, never got > any spam until I posted once to GenSlavic. Now I get them. > > There is nothing a moderator or anyone can do about it, any list gatewayed with a > newsgroup has this issue. The best thing you can do is don't respond to the emails, > just hit delete. The other thing is join another of the Eastern European lists that > are "closed" like Hungary or German-Bohemian and search there. I have gotten a lot > of help by people on GenSlavic but this issue has caused me to be very unactive on > the list. > > It's just a by-product of being gatewayed with a newsgroup.... > >