Debian Mailing List Spam

[Bob Proulx <bob@proulx.com>]

Vladan Cvejic wrote:
> Please,
> 
> if someone could prevent this from happening - this is obviously spam with
> porn commercials. And this is not the only one ... I am receiving similar
> from other countries via debian-laptop, debian-firewall etc....Someone
> should check mails

Please do NOT reply to spam messages to the Debian mailing lists.
Please do NOT include copies of the spam back to the mailing list.
Doing so makes the spam problem worse because now the list contains
your message which trains the spam filters that the message is valid
and the list archives cannot be cleaned.

Because Debian's mailing lists process such a high volume of email it
is possible that the occasional spam will pass through the excellent
spam filters.  This is unavoidable.  The low quantity of these
messages that are actually passed through is a testament to how much
effort the mailing list maintainers put into making them useful to us
the user community.

In such cases that spam passes through the mailing list the best
action to take is:

 * None.  Do not reply to the spam message.  Do not quote any of the
   spam message in any message sent to the mailing list.  Doing so
   makes it impossible to clean the archives and trains the spam
   filters incorrectly on the message.
 * If you must comment upon a spam message then start a new thread by
   starting a new message and do not quote any part of it.
 * If you want to help then "bounce" (re-mail) the message to
   report-listspam@lists.debian.org verbatim.  Reports of spam to that
   email address are used to train the mailing list spam filters.
   This will not work with Gmail or others that filter outbound email.

See also http://www.debian.org/MailingLists/#maintenance

    The Debian Listmasters do their best to stop as many such emails
    as possible from reaching the lists.  On a typical day, over 40,000
    such messages are blocked.

    Many of the rules we use to block spammers and their messages have
    been reported to us by subscribers.  If you wish to help us reduce
    the amount of spam even more, your help is very much appreciated.
    To report spam properly, you need to do the following:

        * Find a copy of the message at the list archives.
        * Find a SpamAssassin rule or a procmail expression to catch this
          type of spam.  Keep in mind that this rule will be applied
          against all lists, and that we want to keep the false positives
          to a minimum.
        * Send email to report-listspam@lists.debian.org with the exact
          URL of the message, and the said filter rule, if possible.

    You will get a reply when we act on your submission.

    Please bear in mind that we will only act on reported spam
    messages/patterns that have been sent in the last few hours,
    because there is no point in having out of date filtering rules.
    Also, please do not send any pre-packaged lists of rules you have
    found somewhere.  They very rarely provide good results on our
    lists, because they receive some pretty unique traffic.
    Do not allow any emails that you receive from any Debian mailing
    lists to be sent to an automated spam reporting system.  Doing so
    is often harmful to all users and will force us to block you from
    receiving traffic from all Debian lists until you prove that you
    will not do so again.

See also http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/ListMaster/ListArchiveSpam