Gary Spivey writes: > former, does somebody have a recommended way to stop them? I have a SPAM > filter running on my end system, but I am just tired of the constant > flow of SPAM.
There's no recommended way. As Mark says, only a choice of evils. The basic problem that we face is that email (and wikis and HTML forms) are *designed* to be open access. That means that they're open to spammers too. All of them can be abused; email is easiest/cheapest to abuse, HTML forms are typically hard/costly to abuse. But somebody is going to try. That's the nature of the beast. As I see it there are three basic strategies: 1. Private networks. The design varies, but the basic idea is that only authorized users can post. This is the strategy that ensures that your users don't get (much) spam. This strategy is inappropriate for an admin address, because "the doorkeeper won't let me in" is a very common problem that legitimate users have. You can't use the same doorkeeper for the support channel! 2. Automated filtering, laxer than the moderation standard, set to "discard" (not "reject", as somebody suggested, because that leads to backscatter). This is basically abdicating much of your responsibility, because legitimate inquiries may get discarded without notice. However, it's fairly easy to tune these to pass all legitimate internal mail (mail from Mailman is very stylized and doesn't look like spam, although nobody in their right mind enjoys reading it :-/ ). 3. Improved human moderation. I have two queues, one which basically amounts to "spamassassin rating 1.0 to 5.0" and the other is Mailman's moderation filters (not a member, etc). I have separate script (using grep and rm -i) which more or less allows discarding the former a page at a time. It's still a burden, but one I find acceptable since the lists are support services for free software, and so I prefer them to be essentially open-post. If (3) interests you, I can go into more detail about my solution, but I gotta run right now. ------------------------------------------------------ Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq01.027.htp
