On Sat, Mar 12, 2005 at 08:55:38AM +0100, Michael Nottebrock wrote: > On Saturday, 12. March 2005 05:57, Vincent wrote: > > > Everybody frowns upon having an open mail relay. ISP's and backbones > > will usually cut the route to other ISP's who have an open mail relays > > and won't fix it. Having an open relay of spam through a mailing list > > is another form of exactly the same thing. > > Sorry for being blunt, but that is utter bullshit. This mailing list is a > support facility, maintained by unpaid volunteers in their sparetime, and we > consciously make it as easy to post (and get replies, too) on it as possible > in order to keep our communication threshold low and I personally find your > calling us part of the spam problem deeply offensive. > > -- > ,_, | Michael Nottebrock | [EMAIL PROTECTED] > (/^ ^\) | FreeBSD - The Power to Serve | http://www.freebsd.org > \u/ | K Desktop Environment on FreeBSD | http://freebsd.kde.org
Sorry if you find my comment offensive, buy I was just stating what in my opinion are the facts (I guess you could see that as a contradiction of terms :-)). The bottom line is, if mailing list maintainers leave the door wide open, it allows the spammers to harvest the mailing list addresses and freely spam large numbers of people who are unable to screen the spam with their normal filters. I appreciate the fact that you are providing a volunteer service and that your motive is to make it as easy as possible for people to get support. But I stand by my opinion that the way you have been going about it has been contributing to the spam problem even though that is not your intention. SpamAssassin on my web hosting providers site has been blocking 98-100% of spam that comes directly to me. The headers that SpamAssassin adds look like this for example X-Spam-Flag: YES X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.0.2 (2004-11-16) on box14.bluehost.com X-Spam-Level: ********************************* X-Spam-Status: Yes, score=33.8 required=5.5 Which gets automatically filtered into my spam box. However, take this example of a recent spam mail from the kde-freebsd mailing list, Subject: [kde-freebsd] Re:?????????? ???? Date: Tue, 01 Mar 2005 11:45:41 +0000 From: adams <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2600.0000 [-- Attachment #1 --] [-- Type: multipart/related, Encoding: 7bit, Size: 11K --] [-- Attachment #1 --] [-- Type: multipart/alternative, Encoding: 7bit, Size: 8.0K --] ???????? WORKbd ?????????? ??? ?????????????? ??????. ??? ???????: (095) 589-44-17 ... [truncated the rest] It is obviously spam with garbage characters and had multiple attachments with images, etc, and should have a high score if SpamAssassin was filtering it before posting to the list. However since I received it from a valid mailing list the SpamAssassin header added at my ISP looks like this. X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.0.2 (2004-11-16) on box14.bluehost.com X-Spam-Level: * X-Spam-Status: No, score=1.1 required=5.5 tests=HTML_50_60,HTML_FONT_BIG, HTML_MESSAGE,MIME_BASE64_BLANKS autolearn=no version=3.0.2 So it comes right through. Note, that I am on the following mailing lists: netbsd-port-i386, zsh, and zsh-workers, and I do not get spam from any them. Also, out of curiosity, I checked the archives of recent postings for the following lists kde-linux, kde-nonlinux, freebsd-current, and freebsd-questions. I did not notice any spam on them either. So far as I can tell, almost all the spam I am getting at this point comes through the kde-freebsd list. Andy did say he was going to look into the spam filter settings, so perhaps they will be able to improve it. Since you are not willing to require subscription to post, another suggestion that would likely cure the problem would be to moderate any postings that come from an address that is not subscribed, or at least forward those postings through a SpamAssassin filter that has a low threshold setting. _______________________________________________ kde-freebsd mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://freebsd.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-freebsd
