Re: Why can I not receive mail from this list

[Kevin Gallagher]

From: "Stefan Monnier" <address@hidden>:
> The FSF mailer seems to regularly be mistakenly added to some blacklist
> (spamcop IIRC).  This happened again a few days ago.
> I wish they had a whitelist as well.

I'm sure this is happening because some criminals regularly use mailing 
lists to send out fraudulent mail and the FSF lists are no exception.  Since 
signing on to several Emacs mailing lists, I periodically receive fraudulent 
notices about various problems with accounts I supposedly have with Ebay, 
PayPal, and quite a few banks.  Each claims that there is a problem with my 
account and I should click on a link to deal with it.  The bogus links in 
these messages typically redirect the unsuspecting person to a web page 
where the criminals try to steal personal information, account numbers, and 
passwords.

It's not a daily occurrence, but it happens often enough to be a real 
problem for unmoderated mailing lists and unsuspecting readers of those 
lists, nevertheless. Each time I have received one of these suspect mail 
messages, I always examine the full mail header.  Since signing up for the 
Emacs mailing lists, every one of these fraudulent notices sent to me has 
come by way of one of the Emacs mailing lists.

All it takes is for one unsuspecting person to get burned and to report it. 
Then, seeing that a number of these are being sent through FSF lists, the 
site admin takes an easy path and blocks all mail from those lists and 
reports his findings to one or more of the blacklist sites.  To prevent this 
from happening in the future, the administrator of the FSF lists may have no 
alternative but to take some defensive measures and put into place a filter 
that blocks the distribution of known fraudulent messages.