OT - Mailing List Admin question

I started the UI mailing list, and that makes me the admin. The
mailing list is rcv'ing a ton of spam that I have to take care of
everyday. Do other admins find the same thing on their lists? If so,
what do you do about it?

brad

On Fri, Nov 09, 2007 at 03:48:01PM -0800, Brad Fuller wrote:
> I started the UI mailing list, and that makes me the admin. The
> mailing list is rcv'ing a ton of spam that I have to take care of
> everyday. Do other admins find the same thing on their lists? If so,
> what do you do about it?
>
> brad

I scan it every other day or so looking for obvious non-spam,
glancing at each message for about 0.8 seconds. I go to the web
page and delete all messages about once a week.

Also, I direct all messages to list owner to a single dedicated
mailbox, so that I can moderate both of my lists at once.

--
Matthew Fulmer -- http://mtfulmer.wordpress.com/
Help improve Squeak Documentation: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/808

I get about 100 spam messages a day!  Very annoying.

I have the notifications emailed to me it's a bit easier to check that way,
for me at least.  They go into a CryptoJunk folder :)

Ron

squeak-dev gets considerably less, usually less than 50.  I don't receive email for each message I see on the web page.

Steve




--
How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment
before starting to improve the world.       -- Anne Frank
Paradise is exactly where you are
right now...only much, much better.    -- Laurie Anderson

Ron Teitelbaum wrote:
> I get about 100 spam messages a day!  Very annoying.
>
> I have the notifications emailed to me it's a bit easier to check that way,
> for me at least.
I do the same thing. Wow, I guess I"m not getting as much as others.
Probably about 20 a day.
There should be a way to have all the msgs from non-registered users
discarded and then automatically added to the "ban" list, but I don't
know how.

Brad Fuller writes:

Although you probably don't totally want to ignore non-registered users, as
occasionally you'll get posts from people who really _are_ on the list, but
aren't using their normal email address - I've been struck with that malady
on odd occasions, as I have six email addresses.

Just my $0.02 worth.

--
The Viking,
Flying Brick Systems

Il giorno ven, 09/11/2007 alle 19.59 -0800, Brad Fuller ha scritto:
There are bookmarklets (javascripts that you store in your browser's
bookmarks) that should do the trick. I remember using a similar one
before Mailman had the "Discard all requests marked Defer" checkbox in
the pending requests page.

        Giovanni

Brad Fuller wrote: The webpage mail list do get some real mail from time to time and I have
to carefully look at the subject and sometimes even the body to see if
its a real message.

Karl

Brad Fuller schrieb:
> I started the UI mailing list, and that makes me the admin. The
> mailing list is rcv'ing a ton of spam that I have to take care of
> everyday. Do other admins find the same thing on their lists? If so,
> what do you do about it?
>
> brad
>
>
>  
My experience is that spam can be blocked quite effectively at the mail
system's SMTP server, using DNS-based blocklists and a huge and growing
local list of IP ranges from which no legitimate mail can be expected
(mostly dynamic IPs - DSL and dialup).

I'm using postfix, but DNSBLs are usable in qmail as well which is used
on lists.squeakfoundation.org.

This is no silver bullet, of course, but it should reduce the amount of
spam to be dealt with by a significant margin.

Cheers,
Hans-Martin

The lists that I'm currently using are zen.spamhaus.org, list.dsbl.org,
and ix.dnsbl.manitu.net.
There are other options, but these three seem to be well-maintained and
cover a lot.
My local access list is probably too broad to be used in any other context.

On Sat, 2007-11-10 at 11:52 +0100, Hans-Martin Mosner wrote: In my experience the most effective spam prevention is to use
greylisting [1]. Next is text heuristics. I have some email addresses
which are older than 12 years and I think it's assured they are
one any avalaible email list. I used to get up to 200 spam mails
a day (and this was 3 years ago). I tested some things over the
year and now I use all together. My experience shows that greylisting
prevents 95%-98% of all spam. Spamassassin is doing the last 2 %.
Tarpitting [3] and IP blacklists are good helpers anyway. So no reason
not to use them. Today the situation has completely changed for me.
Half of the days I get no spam at all. On the half I receive up to
2 spam mails a day.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greylisting
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpamAssassin
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarpit_%28networking%29

Norbert

Norbert Hartl schrieb:
>
> In my experience the most effective spam prevention is to use
> greylisting [1].
Yes that's pretty good, too. Since some spammers have adapted to
greylisting I have been using different greylist times depending on the
reverse DNS of the sender IP. If it is unknown or looks like a dynamic
address, the time is one hour, otherwise 5 minutes. That works pretty well.
> Next is text heuristics. I have some email addresses
> which are older than 12 years and I think it's assured they are
> one any avalaible email list.
Text heuristics are ok for individual mailboxes, but for a mail server
operator there can be legal problems if mail bodies are inspected.
Of course, a mailing list operator might employ any filter heuristics
he/she deems ok.

Cheers,
Hans-Martin

On Sat, 2007-11-10 at 13:38 +0100, Hans-Martin Mosner wrote: (Just a quick note. I don't think we should extend the topic on this
list)

It depends. You can do everything with incoming mail as long as your
customers agree to it. We deliver detected spam to a specific folder.
There are two additional folders for the users to notify the system
about "false positives" and "false negatives". So the system can "learn"
what is considered as spam.

Norbert

In the admin interface under Privacy...->Sender
Filters->generic_nonmember_action, set it to discard.  If you are simply
going to reject posts from all non-members it would be pointless to also
ban them.

Ken

On Fri, 2007-11-09 at 19:59 -0800, Brad Fuller wrote:

Thanks Ken, I think it reasonably acceptable to set this filter to
"reject". If a legitimate poster emails the list who is a non-member,
and the email bounces back to him, then hopefully they'll realize that
they need to join.

On Nov 10, 2007 1:35 PM, Ken Causey <[hidden email]> wrote:

Brad Fuller schrieb:
> Thanks Ken, I think it reasonably acceptable to set this filter to
> "reject". If a legitimate poster emails the list who is a non-member,
> and the email bounces back to him, then hopefully they'll realize that
> they need to join.
>  
The problem with the "reject" policy is that without strong spam
blocking *before* spam gets into Mailman you would generate backscatter
(i.e. unrelated people whose addresses are used as the fake spam sender
address get unsolicited mail from the mailing list system).

Cheers,
Hans-Martin