Long Time Listener, First Time Caller (was: RE: USAffairs)

["Ben Levy" <belevy@syr.edu>]

I've been "lurking" the list by reading off of the website for quite a while
now... This is definitely one of the most interesting things I read on a
daily basis.

For the first time I've actually seen something I feel the need to comment
on... Adam is not a spammer. He made a mistake, and he fixed it. Here's my
breakdown of what happened.

1. Adam sent an invite for the USAffairs group to the listserv... was that
on-mission for this group, not directly. However, give him credit, this
group (as all on the Internet have) has been talking about the crisis from
its point-of-view, the slant of the radio industry. However, this group
shouldn't stray from it's radio focus, so those who want to talk about
purely the crisis do so on a list dedicated to it. Therefore, it made sense
to Adam that the members of this group might want to be invited to that
group. Rather than type everybody in one-by-one, he used the group address.
2. Yahoo! sent it's little auto-generated invite to
boston-radio-interest@bostonradio.org, per Adam's request. That doesn't add
you to the list, it just invites you to do so by replying. No harm there.
3. The list server, in its normal operations, sends back a copy to whomever
sends it an e-mail. It sends Yahoo! a copy of its message. (Adam didn't
think of this, this is where the trouble starts...)
4. Yahoo!, seeing the confirmation code it sent being replyed back to that
misinterprets that as boston-radio-interest@bostonradio.org accepting the
invite. It sends the "Welcome to the list!" message.
5. Adam, quickly realizing his error denies
boston-radio-interest@bostonradio.org its subscription as administrator of
USAffairs. No actual USAffiairs traffic ever made it here.

Not the brighest move, but not badly intentioned either. We've all hit
buttons thinking they'd do one thing when they'd do another... leaving dead
air, playing two ads at once, joining two e-mail lists together... it
happens, it gets fixed, we learn not to do that again.

I'm gonna hang up and listen to your answer now. :)