[NTLUG:Discuss] (no subject)

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Sat, May 14, 2011 at 11:50:10PM -0500, Gilbert Morrow wrote:
> Um, just alerting that the Spam is still getting through .
> I find it offensive that a Linux group can't stop e-mail spam .

Organizations such as GMail and pobox.com and many more spend
millions of dollars trying to implement effective spam filters
and still do not come anywhere near to a 100% catch rate.

In light of this, I think it's somewhat unreasonable to expect 
that a mailing list run by an entirely-volunteer Linux group 
would be able to catch 100% of spam in all cases, especially 
since the latest spam is being injected through the hacked 
addresses of valid subscribers.

Note that the more restrictive filters used by DFWUUG for its
lists likely would not have caught these two spam messages -- 
the messages are plain text, do not have attachments, came from
valid member subscriptions, and arrived from "reputable" MTAs 
such as hotmail.com and yahoo.com.

Note that a captcha barrier to subscription wouldn't have any
ability to prevent the spam we've received.  It might be
a nice filter against future spamming attempts, but our
mailing list software (Mailman) doesn't appear to offer a
captcha option for subscription.  So we'd either have to hack
one in (not likely) or switch to a different mailing list manager
altogether that does offer one (in which case it needs to be
hosted elsewhere).  

I'll provide whatever I can on my end to help prevent further 
spam from coming through the list, but I think a 100% 
spam-never-gets-through is a quite unrealistic expectation,
for *any* mailing list.  Even the mailing lists I've run 
through Google Groups have gotten an occasional spam.

As Ralph said, we've done quite well until the spammers escalated
in the last couple of days.

Pm