managing spam

I own a yahoo email group in which all posts are moderated, including my own. We haven't had the first spam message. We have no
restrictions on joining. The member list is viewable only by moderators. It would be possible for a spammer to join and harvest
emails of those who post. That has not occurred that I know of. The "commercial" spammers go for the abandoned email groups where
they can reach a lot of people with little effort. I have seen a spammer join my email group and then see the same spammer post in
an abandoned or unmoderated group. The spammers email address usually starts to bounce soon after they can't post.

I do eventually develop email pen pals where either of us starts to discuss things that are maybe not of interest to the email
group. It also could be that we want to discuss things that we do not want to share with the group until we have better developed
our point of view. Those always start with one or the other of us sending an unsolicited email to the other. If you get an email
from someone who you do not want to reply to, you don’t.

Have you ever been to a company training session on sexual harassment? I think the rule there was anyone could ask anyone for a date
and it not be harassment. The second time, after a first refusal, it was. Why not apply the same rule to person to person off group
email?

[Steve Blackmore]Why alter it in the first place? The levels of spam on Yahoo groups are very low indeed, the necessary precautions
were already in place with moderation of new members.

Internet=SPAM, there is NO 100% fix, If the odd spam message bothers somebody to the point of paranoia, perhaps the internet and
moderating groups is not for them.

How much time have you, I, and others wasted trying to sort work arounds for this? I get more crap phone calls, than spam in yahoo
groups. I'm not even bothering wasting any more time on it. It's simpler to unsubscribe.