Book People Archive

ADMIN: Spammer removed from list

I've just removed from the Book People list someone who was sending
unsolicited commercial messages to people who posted.

That person subscribed to the list about a year ago, but apparently
only recently started to do instant spam-replies.  It's possible she
was collecting email addresses from posters for later spam use
prior to this, though.  (I did notice that the Book People *submission*
address started getting spam almost immediately after the address changed,
something that had taken much longer to happen for the old CMU address.)
They would not have been able to get the full subscriber list, though;
only Mary and I can see that, and we don't share it with others.

The online public archives of Book People currently
hide parts of all email addresses that appear on the list, to prevent
them from being used by outside spammers.  There
is also a private "unobscured" version of the archives that we set up before
adding our email-hiding interface, with access credentials that
were not made public, but that were shared with listmembers.  We
stopped providing these credentials in September 2005 when we reopened
the public archive with email-hiding codes. I'm not sure whether the
spammer joined before or after that time, but just to be on the safe side,
I've reset the password for the "unobscured" archive, since
I don't think most people need to use it now that there's a public archive.
If you do need to look at particular archived messages in their original
form, though, let me know.

Hundreds of people use this list to read and talk about online books
and related issues, and we like to keep it a welcoming and useful place
where people don't have to worry about getting unwanted commercial
solicitation.  I regret that we had a listmember that was abusing the trust
of the list, and we will do our best to prevent this from happening in
the future, and to take quick action if it does.

John Mark Ockerbloom
Co-moderator, Book People mailing list