Some of you may have received spam messages in recent days that purport
to come from the Nabokv-L listserver. I can assure you that the
listserver has not forwarded you any spam; a spammer has "spoofed" the
list's header and is using it to mass-mail junk to some, but not all,
of our list members (I, for example, did not receive the spam at my
subscribed address). I know some of you have received spam, even if
you do not know it, because I have received the bounced messages
generated by your spam filters (good for them!).
One possible cause of this problem may have been that to date, our list
has been set with a possibility for open review of unconcealed
subscribers by all interested parties. This setting is no longer
recommended, as spammers can easily harvest large lists of names. I
fear this may have happened to our list. As a first step, I have
changed the setting for the Review command so that only the editors can
review the list. After some time passes, I will re-set it so that
subscribers can again review the list of unconcealed list members, and
if problems reappear, I will make the list permanently concealed.
Problems may continue for a while regardless of my action, as it seems
that a spammer has obtained part of our list and may continue to use it
for some time. If you would like your name and email to be permanently
viewable only by the moderators (not including individual postings you
might make), visit the list's subsciber management page:
http://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?REPORT&z=3
Log in with your email address, create a password for yourself, and
modify your settings to "concealed".
I hope that most of you are unaffected by this attack. For those
receiving spam that pretends to come from Nabokv-L or anywhere else for
that matter, please be aware that spam filters do work fairly well most
of the time, and you might want to see whether your email service
provides access to one.
With thanks for your patience and support,
Stephen Blackwell
Co-Editor