semi-moderating debian lists

[Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es>]

Hello.

These are some statistics about the approximate amount of spam mail
received from all the Debian lists I'm subscribed to during this month
until today:

                        Legitimate           Spam     % of spam messages
Below 0                       5616             73                  1.3 %
Between 0 and 1               1168            135                 10.4 %
Between 1 and 2                156            167                 51.7 %
Between 2 and 3                 65            268                 80.5 %
Between 3 and 4                  6             27                 81.8 %

Notes:

* This data already contains a correction for the 1.8 additional
points every message had due to the NO_MX_FOR_FROM thing, which has
just been fixed today (thanks Jaakko).

* If I had to predict the spam I will receive next month from this table,
the data between 3 and 4 should be multiplied by 5, because the
"effective" threshold until today has been 3.2 (i.e. 5.0 - 1.8).


So, what about this?

-> For every list for which at least X people volunteer to be moderators,
messages having a score higher than Y points will be moderated.

X and Y are reasonable numbers chosen so that:

a) spam is greatly reduced (i.e. we would achieve nothing by setting Y at 4.0)
[ IMHO, 2.0 would be a good start for Y, since there are much more spam
messages over 2.0 than legitimate email ].

b) moderators do not have a lot of work to do (i.e. Y is not so low
that they have to moderate almost everything), and

c) legitimate messages do not have to wait too much before being approved
(i.e. X is not too small).


Naive question: Would anyone object if I ask the listmasters to
implement this procedure? [ Remember, "If you want something done,
do it yourself" does not work at all for things where you need root ].

Thanks.