You may have a list with aktivix – or any other provider of mailman lists. This applies to most if not all mailman list services.

So you are one of the administrators of a mailman list – because you really, really should be one of several administrators.

And you may think that it has been hacked because you continue to receive spam sent to you specifically, starting with “Hi . Most likely it is addressed to the list, then blocked as it comes from an address not subscribed to it, or to the owner of the list, which is, all the addresses listed in the ‘admin’ field.

More than hacked, list are usually targeted by spammers. It happens to most email addresses old enough to be noticed by email harvesting machines on the internet.

The way aktivix have set up the mailing list service is that when an email is held in ‘moderation’ for whatever reason, which is usually that the address is not subscribed to the list, all admins receive a daily reminder with the number of emails waiting.

It has happened often that some admins forget about being admins of a list until they start receiving these reminders, and they can’t do anything to stop them getting these e mails because they forgot the password to access the moderation or admin interface too.

The mailman interface is set up so that, when this happens, any of the other admins (understand now why it should be more of you?) can remove you from the admin team. You could do this too, with the password.

If no one of the list admin team can remember the admin password (yes, it has happened too) the aktivix collective admin people can do this for you, by removing your address from the email interface – and we will encourage you to ask the list for a new admin team that will revive the list, or even the activity the list was set up for in the first place.

We know that you can block it and it would be the easiest thing for you do do, but the aktivix admins, and also all of the aktivix users, will be very grateful that you do not do this because most if not all of the ‘big traders’ (some times referred to as GAFAM, or GMAFIA or GMAFYA depending on whether you include there Google, aol, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft only, or include Instagram and Yahoo as well) tend to label as spam emails blocked by its users, which causes great harm to servers dealing with big email services that would be blocked. So, in the name of all users of alternative email providers, thank you you for not blocking our emails.

Every time our servers are blocked by GMAFYA, which is, every time you notice that emails from aktivix (or whatever other alternative provider) are not correctly and promptly delivered to email addresses hosted by gmail, aol or yahoo, admins of aktivix (and every other alternative provider) have to spend minutes in theory, hours in practice, filling our impersonal reports and forms to try get those big providers to unblock us.

So, there is no hacking apart from what big corporate providers do which tend to cause harm to alternative providers like aktivix, which is why we encourage every one to try decent providers and dittch the money-grabbing ones

Please consider one of these instead:

https://help.riseup.net/en/security/resources/radical-servers
https://libreho.st/
https://network23.org/bou/dr/#collectives

Thank you !