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I'm too new to be expert about spamming, but from what I see here are some ideas: 1. Commercial advertising on otherwise free media is common, and use of email should be no surprise. In other media such use is often controlled by law, with fines for violation. For example in some communities if you park your car on the street with a "for sale" sign, you might expect a citation by local police, at enough cost to be discouraging. Likewise, if you tack a notice of your garage sale to an electric pole on public property, you may be charged for it by the authorities. Many communities restrict how you may advertise even on your own property, on the theory that such ads are seen from adjacent property which is public. 2. You won't discourage the spammer by flaming on your own list- he uses an automatic address system and never reads any electronic responses. Likewise, jamming his mailbox probably won't work because he is smart, and switches to a new service provider after each big mailing. He will have a new ID every time so you can't just automatically reject any particular caller. If you do try to respond by email, you risk letting him retaliate by messing up your own personal address. 3. The spammer's Achilles heel is use of surface mail. He can't expect you to send money by email, so every message has to contain a real surface mail address, either an office or a home, where he can receive your money. Even with only a post office box, it is still easy for the authorities to find him. Postal laws usually are strict, and the spammer will probably be careful to avoid any violation of those laws. 4. It is easy to program a listserver to reject email from any particular sender address, but that probably won't be effective for long, for the reasons outlined above. You might base rejection on the surface mail address, which is harder to change, but that would require scanning through the body of every single incoming message to look for the offender. 5. The only way to discourage the offensive practice of spamming is to make it costly, and that would require laws and regulation, something that horrifies most users. But the only alternative is to suffer the nuisance; without any risk of real penalties, the smart offender can always get around any other deterrent. As long as spamming remains dirt cheap and free of any substantial penalty, you may expect it to continue. J. R. Bruman (818) 789-3694 3527 Cody Road Sherman Oaks CA 91403 On Tue, 29 Aug 1995, Kees Paap wrote: > Hi Barb, John and other listfriends, > > Maybe this is an idea to get rid of the jerk : > > We have ca 800 listmembers. > If each one sends him 1 long message (copy a long message) > If we resend this 10 times, his box will be overloaded???? > > We can do it each time he sends us a message! > > Kees >