To all you folks who have just got to work on monday morning, were
annoyed by the spammer and had to sigh your way to the replies to the
spam: please forgive me that I also am elaborating on it. Below is a
suggestion that might give some relief to the spam.

On Sat, 25 Jan 1997, hoss karoly wrote:

> Lifetime Opportunity wrote:
> >
> > SEND OUT 20,000+ MARKETING LETTERS EVERY SINGLE DAY!
> >
> > I can see you have a genuine love and respect of
> > people...
> >

Way to go Hoss! You at least noticed some irony in the thing, made me
smile (gee, did you actually *read* the spam?!)

> am I the only one who hates this kind of spam ?
> and I'm not sure "remove" will work
>
> > To be removed - hit "reply" and type remove in subject of message.
> >
> > I operate a custom email service. From my experience, your typical
> > bulk email service just collects email addresses from any source
>
> it'll send them your e-mail address which isn't in their inventory yet
> we received this mail through the list but you'll send them your e-mail
> ...

Exactly and replying "remove" to the piclist doesn't help anybody anyway.
So watch out before you slam that reply-button, people. Count to 10 or
so. Do it again in venusian :-) Shout at the wife. Kick the dog. Only
_then_ reply spams to the list.

O.K.; here's the serious stuff:

I am subscribed to another mailinglist, the debian-user list (about the
Debian Linux system, www.debian.org) and it has quite an effective anti
spam mechanism. Upon subscription, you are replied an agreement form,
which states that sending commercial messages is o.k. but costs $1000...
You can't post to the list unless you reply the agreement. Maybe this,
when adopted to the piclist, would be something for the piclist-fund :-)
So far, I haven't seen any spammers buying "spamspace" on debian-user
however.

There's some more related to that list that I'd like to mention on this
list: the list-software adds a line to all reflected messages, saying:
"If you want to unsubscribe from this list write UNSUBSCRIBE to: blablah."

By the way, the debian-user list most of the time has much more traffic
than the piclist. So nobody wil hear _me_ complain about traffic density
on the piclist. Moreover, debian-user is actually gated to a newsgroup and
when I post to the list, I "mysteriously" receive spam...

Joost

P.S.: If you really _must_ get back at the spammers (because otherwise
you'd have _real_ work to :-) , read the alt.slack FAQ