On Mar 15, 2004, at 7:26 PM, Russell Coker wrote:
On Tue, 16 Mar 2004 11:48, Michael Loftis <mloftis@modwest.com> wrote:I realise this but the debian lists aren't doing that one basic thing which really, truly, does stop atleast 70% of all spam, probably more, sent tolists. Most of what we ALL get through these lists are from garbageaddresses. and DNSBLs don't help when the email is being relayed through a 'white' host. Not at the front door anyway. And I don't want to have toprocess them at all.There are situations when people who aren't subscribed have a legitimate reason for posting. Consider messages that get cross-posted to major listssuch as linux-kernel.
I agree with you Russell, but I suggest a good compromise is to moderate unsubscribed posts.
This has a flaw for some types of spammer which are aware of mailing lists and subscribe to the list, then make a post so this kind of filter doesn't work so well on list environments like yahoo groups, but it would cut down on the amount of spam for certain on Debian lists.
It shouldn't be too difficult for someone with access to the list membership and the list archives to calculate some statistics for the number of posts/week for different debian lists would be moderated due to sender address not being subscribed, just to see what kind of burden it would be for the list moderators.
Also, a workaround for the flaw in this method to avert spam is to moderate subscriptions, but this will probably be less acceptable to the community.
-- David Stanaway <david@stanaway.net>