Dear Colleagues

A few days ago I started received a number of emails from "[Wikimedia-l]", which I found odd, as I had set my delivery satus to "no mail".

It turns out that the emails are not coming from "wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org", but from "wikimedia-l wikimedia-l@googlegroups.com". However, the display name of the list is simply Wikimedia-l, identical to the name of this list.

I find it perturbing that people could be duped into participating in discussions on a forum other then what they thought was the case. This borders on phishing, scamming, posing, pretending to be someone else to get benefit out of it. In fact, in a number of jurisdictions it is taken as a seriuos crime.

Said list was created by a user by the name of Toby Dollmann and he or she has been adding people willy-nilly, regardless of whether they are involved with Wikipedia/ Wikimedia or not and completely without thei knowing about it, based on some event atended by "a number of people", who expressed desire for a list, an idea supported by three or four of those people.

Any idea as to what could be done about this?

Best regards,

Rui