LibertyTreeFDR.org?

[stilpist]

wuzzat? :shrug:

I got an e-mail from them yesterday telling how to unsubscribe from their mailing list. Strange thing: I didn't know I was ON their mailing list. Since then about a dozen more e-mails from apparantly random people - that I guess clicked "Reply to All" - all saying Please take me off your list. Seems strange ...

I went to their (I guess) website at the url in above subject line (www). They sound reasonably lefty, and they list a bunch of liberal-sounding folks as "Fellows," but nothing about who are the founders or Executive Director or leaders or any such.

Does anyone (everyone?) here know anything about them?

Thanks,
Stil

[teach1st]

1. A bunch of us here...

..have received the e-mails re the mailing list. It appears to me that they had a problem with the list and they finally trashed it today. The list ain't there no more.

As to where they got our e-mail addresses, I don't know.

[stilpist]

3. Thanks

I must have missed whatever earlier discussion. I scanned around a bit but didn't see anything.

[benburch]

2. They SPAMMED me, too.

No idea about which mailing list they are using.

[Cornus]

4. Same here

I got that email and at least twenty more from people asking to be deleted...probably the same ones you got: Debbie, Bonnie, Tommat, Edward Kelley, Paulann Sheets, Donna Deitch, and many others.

Wish I knew what was up with this. I never asked to be placed on their list.

[waldnorm]

5. I Have . . .

Thank goodness for Earthlink's spam folder as I don't receive anyone until I approve including them. It looks like this organization got our Emails from one forum. If this organization is legit, they may be for a good cause, but you do NOT subscribe people to a list until you ask permission from them first. When their link for the listserv still worked, I asked what was my password, and never got a response, since supposedly you can't do anything until you get a password. If they are a noble organization, they goofed, by pissing a bunch of people off.

[teach1st]

7. They did send out an e-mail to all...

..with each user's password. That appeared to be the initialization of the list and it is what caused all of the "please remove me" replies to ALL. The list archives had no content, just complaints and "remove me" messages from the past few days.

My password let me in, but the unsubscribe function didn't work.

I think that whoever did this had no idea how to do this.

The list is gone:

http://lists.libertytreefdr.org/mailman/options/libertynews/

[TahitiNut]

6. It's called a "listserv" in old Internet terms.

Apparently, somebody swiped a whole shitload of email addresses (possibly from DU?) and loaded them into that hoax of a listserv.

The reason every email sent to the listserv went to all the "subscribers" is that's the way a listserv works.

[Cornus]

8. But...

Why am I also getting emails from people asking to be removed from the list? Already got twenty since I got the original email from LibertyTreeFDR.org (see my post above. Is it because they hit reply to ALL and whoever got the original email also got a copy of their request to be deleted? I also have a hotmail address and this was also getting these emails, but they were all filtered into the junk folder.

[RoyGBiv]

9. As mentioned ...

That's how a listserv works. Every message sent to the list is echoed to every member of the list.

The e-mail you get has a reply-to address in its headers that is associated with the central e-mail address for the list, so when you hit "reply" your e-mail is directed to the listserv's distribution in-box rather than the individual author of a message. All messages received by that in-box are resent to each member of the list.

A properly administered listserve, besides not automatically signing people up to it, will have several e-mail addresses that do different things, and these should be noted in the e-mails you receive. One will typically be something like [e-mail] and/or subscribe-listname and unsubscribe-listname. Send e-mail to those, and it doesn't get echoed, but does something specific, like send e-mail to the administrator, subscribe to the list, or unsubscribe from the list.

[low_phreaq]

10. Probably good group (with David Cobb), just goofed on listserv?

I got this message too. They seem like a good group. Here are some of the people associated with the group:
http://www.libertytreefdr.org/fellows.htm
Names I recognize are David Cobb, 2004 Green Party nominee for President of the United States, and Ben Manski, former co-chair of the Green Party of the United States. Ben was also involved with the South Central Wisconsin group for No Stolen Elections (www.nov3.us) and I assume that's where they got my email address.
I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and hope it was just some sysadmin with happy fingers and they didn't really mean to spam us. I sent them a message asking for an explanation, we'll see if I get one.

[murielm99]

11. I started a thread in the lounge about this.

I wondered if DU was the commonality, or they got my e-mail address from somewhere else. I was puzzled by the whole thing, and thought it might be a virus.

[IChing]

12. got it too.....something has been

hacked

nothing on my other e-mail accounts just hotmail

I think the administrators here need to be alerted.

[friesianrider]

13. I got them too...and the reply to sender nonsense, too.

I tried to unsub, but...

[IChing]

14. It was a hack please alert.

[TreasonousBastard]

15. I don't think it was a hack...

just someone screwing up the commands on the listserve software.

A year or so ago I got a slew of emails from some list with piles of people yelling to get off of it. Then, a lot used "reply all" to cause even more traffic and piss off the people who knew better. Eventually, whoever screwed it up went to the right people for help and it stopped.

How did they get the email addys? Lots of ways-- blog and usenet postings, buying lists... In additon to some places that might "share" addys with other fellow-travellers, there are quite a few sites that "harvest" addys from emails it gets with large recipient lists.

The way it works is that if I'm at liberalwhatsis.org and someone adds me to the list of a dozen people they are forwarding an alert to, I might see the dozen or so others, plus the dozens of people who got the thing and forwarded it in the past week if the email addys weren't scrubbed from it.

So, I have a small routine that harvest all the addys it can find in the email and saves them to a database, figuring that these people might be interested in my site. I may or may not email them some time.

It's not exactly like buying spam lists, but some people might think it's close enough.

[blondeatlast]

16. Thanks for the explanation. As a nosubscriber, I was pretty alarmed

when all this started happenig, but the org seems on the up-and-up from a cursory glance.

One question, if I may? If we got this stuff, are we subscribed? Will we need to unsubscribe?

I am absolutely swamped by e-mail lately, even by those I subscribe to, and considering changing my addy and starting fresh, so this I definitely don't need!

Thanks again for sharing your knowledge!

[TreasonousBastard]

17. You're probably not subscribed, but...

you'll know for sure if you start getting stuff from them.

Then, just unsubscribe.