Re: debian-ctte mailing list and spam
Manoj Srivastava writes ("Re: debian-ctte mailing list and spam"):
> I deal with spam on about a dozen debian mailing lists, and I
> see this list as little different. I heartily recommend crm114 to
> people who want to eliminate spam from their inboxes.
Presumably crm114 is a spamfilter of some kind. However, I think that
spamfiltering of mailing lists should be done before the list is
exploded, and spamfiltering should reject messages rather than
discarding them.
Spamfiltering at the input to the list is more efficient, has more
information available to make its decision, ensures that everyone sees
the same set of messages as having been posted to the list, and is the
only way to arrange that posters whose messages are mistakenly marked
as spam actually get told.
The latter two items are critical: far too much spamfiltering nowadays
is of the `messages sometimes disappear' variety. Any effective
spamfilter is going to have _some_ false positives, and having those
messages vanish (or be delivered to some, but not all, recipients)
without any notification to the sender is very bad, I think.
I definitely think that that's worse than having a clumsy arrangement
for permitting posting.
I agree that I don't like challenge-response systems for personal
mailboxes. But similar systems have been used for some time for
mailing list posting with good effect. Member posting only is often a
crude stand-in for challenge-response.
Personally I prefer the PGP signature scheme. But the PGP mechanism
and a C-R mechanism aren't mutually exclusive. If you dislike C-R
then you can take the challenge notification as a bounce and simply
resend your message signed.
Ian.
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