A mail list is an email delivery system. You sign up, and then information is sent to your email account. Mail lists can be useful, but they can also be a pain in the rump. Fortunately, things are better today than they were ages ago.

The issue was verification. That’s not a problem today, but back in the 1990s it wasn’t even an afterthought. Basically, you could sign up for an email list and you were instantly subscribed. So if some rapscallion signed you up for Tuba Players Anonymous, you’d get their weekly (or daily) email list full of useful information, trivia, or what-have-you.

With verification, you’re usually sent a confirmation email:

Hey! Someone using your email address wants to subscribe to the My Adorable Cat email list. Respond to this message with the word SUBSCRIBE and we’ll set you up. Otherwise ignore this message and all will be okee doke.

I remember asking a Lord High Internet Nerd about verification back in the late 1990s. He scowled at me. “That’s absurd!” he said. “It would foul the entire system!”

Yes, he really was that pompous. And he was wrong, too: Email verification was vital to the survival of email lists. After all, what’s to prevent someone else from signing you up to some email list you don’t want to read?

In the mid 1990s, a hacker decided to do just that. He didn’t like the book Parenting For Dummies, which I co-wrote with my then-wife, Sandy. To demonstrate his disdain, he signed Sandy up for every email list known to man. Thousands of them.

She wasn’t alone: He also signed up Rush Limbaugh and a bunch of well-known celebrities. An article was written about this episode in the Wall Street Journal. He later lamented signing up Sandy, but that didn’t change the fact that her email address was rendered useless. The ISP had to shut it down because she was getting megabytes of email per minute.

See why verification is a good thing?

Still, even today, not every mail list service offers verification.

For example, some wag signed me up for the MoveOn.org mail list. Likewise, other politicos signed me up for various right-wing email lists — four of them, each of which spews the same, identical message. But I never signed up!

For each list, I found an unsubscribe link. Some of them unsubscribed me at once, but others persisted. It took a while to stop the mail from coming. Eventually I got things ironed out.

Still, imagine what hell it would be if anyone could sign you up for any old mailing list? Thanks to verification, such an issue is a thing of the past. That that, Lord High Internet Nerd!