[Mailman-Users] what constitutes spam?

[Anne Wainwright]

Hi,

I recently sent an invite to an unknown third party. The invite came
from my mailman list, we gave full particulars of who and where we are.
We specifically advise that they are not at this stage subscribed to
anything and will have to follow the detailed instructions (ie confirm)
if they want to join the list. The third party is in the same trade as
us, and deals with the same specialities, a third party customer had
given me their address in good faith.

This week my ISP contacts me with an upstream request from the national
backbone provider to in effect desist from sending spam.

Looking at the email returned, it was to an @yahoo address,  spamcop
seems to have detected spam on the basis of it being a mailman message,
I am not certain that it was not initiated by the recipient but the
official complaint originated from yahoo it seems (who should surely
know better).

Subject: [196.26.208.190] Yahoo Abuse Report - FW:confirm
3a35c56b531368da533112d96a9cb24c17cf6961

As I said in my reply, this is hardly spam, I did not send it out to
half a million addresses purchased on a cd. This makes a mockery of
genuine spam prevention efforts when one email from a genuine address
can be allowed to cause this. It 

I don't want to make a mountain out of a molehill, but what can I do
about this. Is this a common occurence? Are invites from mailman now
considered fair game for spam detection software and humans alike?

bestest
Anne