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Well, as you have all noticed, we have been spammed again. I am happy to report that this time the spammer will receive his just deserts! He used a real account in his own name and violated the membership agreement with his service provider, so he not only loses his Internet access, he's going to have to pay for the connect time, etc, expended by PRIMENET.COM's staff on clearing up the mess! Sometimes the system works.... At this point, we have 2 choices as a list. We can continue to be a public list, which means anyone can post a message to REED-L. The good side of this is that we can receive announcements of interest from non-members but the bad side is that it leaves us open to spammers. We have now been hit three times, I think, which is not bad but still very annoying. Or we can become a private list, and receive postings only from members. I am not sure we would lose anything by this and we would certainly gain the protection against spamming. But I would like to know what you think before I do anything..... In the meantime, I would like to ask that if we are spammed, you please send messages of reproach or indignation to the sender of the spam and his/her service provider (something like [log in to unmask] usually works: I wrote about the last spam to [log in to unmask], for example). The commercial service providers, especially in the USA, are often trying to prevent this kind of mis-use of the Internet becasue they feel it will backfire on legitimate commercial users. So don't letter-bomb them with 50 copies of the spam: they are probably on your side. Sometimes what happens is that these spammers sign up for one of those 30-day-free-trial accounts with fake addresses and credit-card information, send out the spam and then disappear. The great problem as well as the most annoyance about all this is the unnecessary mail it engenders on lists, so for everyone's sake it is better not to respond on our own list whan this kind of thing happens. Complain to the spammers and let me know about any problems too. Apolegetically yours, Abigail