advocacy/89731: TOO MANY SPAMs on jp.freebsd.org's mailing list

[John Baldwin]

On Wednesday 30 November 2005 01:07 am, Takeo Hashimoto wrote:
> Currently every subscriber has to spend their time
> wading through the spam to pick up the ones which are not spam.
> (Of course it is dissipation of resources.)

Yes, I use spamassassin personally.  Also, I should note that FreeBSD.org's 
mail server employs some aggressive spam filtering which stops a lot of it 
from showing up on FreeBSD lists.  Perhaps the jp folks could setup some spam 
filtering on their mail server as well to cut down on the load.  Note that 
only a couple of FreeBSD.org lists are restrict_post, most are open.

> >                            This means that someone new to FreeBSD
> > will likely have their questions lost because the e-mail will never
> > make it to the list (e.g. freebsd-questions) and would make it that
> > much harder for new people to get help getting started with FreeBSD.
>
> It is not difficult to subscribe ML
> even if they are new to FreeBSD.

I think you overestimate the skill of some newbies.  The other problem is that 
some ML, like questions@, get a large number of e-mails a day.  I'm not sure 
it's fair to require a user to wade through a hundred or more non-spams just 
so they can ask a question.

> > Adding restrict_post actually is a lot of work on the admins since
> > someone has to handle all the bounced e-mails.
>
> I think we can simply ignore them (>/dev/null).
>
> If you have better idea to stop deliver spam,
> please let me know.

Most of the FreeBSD developers when we have had discussions on spam recently 
have concluded that the spam problem is so large and extent, that the only 
real solution is for the receiver to block spam.  For example, since you've 
submitted a PR, you'll probably now get just as much spam from that and this 
e-mail exchange as you would by being on a jp list.  The actual advocacy@ 
list might not get as much spam sent to it, but your personal e-mail address 
will be flooded, so you're going to need to setup some filtering on your 
receiving end no matter what.  You can see more responses about that if you 
look at the recent thread on cvs-all about the commit to query-pr.cgi to 
sort-of hide e-mail addresses.

-- 
John Baldwin <jhb at FreeBSD.org>  <><  http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/
"Power Users Use the Power to Serve"  =  http://www.FreeBSD.org