Is spam software now joining groups, sending back the confirmation message, sending the spam, and then unsubscribing?
Yes, except not unsubscribing. I unsubscribed the spam email by hand.
If the spammers have gotten this sophisticated, then I think the subscription policy should be changed to require approval of new subscriptions.
I agree, except that I see no need to panic because ONE spam message got through in the last year or two of the list. But if I did approve subscriptions, how would I know an email was a spam email? The only way would be for me to sent an email that required a human response. They are discussing this on the xmission list admin list. Apparently many lists at xmission were spammed. However one list admin said that his list is not published, and he did not get the spam. I could do the same. That would mean that if you go to mailman.xmission.com you would not see our lists mentioned. There is probably little harm in this, because I would think virtually all list members come from one of the fractint websites, not from browsing xmission's lists. Tim