Postal Notification

[Warren Block]

On Mon, 3 Nov 2014, Julian H. Stacey wrote:

> Darren Pilgrim wrote:
>> On 11/3/2014 8:01 AM, jd1008 wrote:
>>> Is there a way to PREVENT such spam???
>>
>> The spam was sent through the mailing list.  There is no way to stop
>> spammers from abusing mailing lists unless you make the list closed
>> access (which would utterly defeat the point of the FreeBSD MLs).
>
> That's painting it simple. There's various mail list types on @freebsd,
> inc. eg: Announce; Subscribers Only; Moderated=Censored jobs@; [etc?].

Agreed.  Another way of looking at it is that by not requiring 
subscription and hence allowing some spammers, we are making the list 
less helpful to the very people who need it.  There must be other open 
mailing lists out there, but they are extremely rare.

> questions@ has discussed before if we should require subscription,
> (& if so, to reword /etc/motd to tell posters to subscribe first);
>
> A majority who expressed a preference did not want subscription required.
> (I was with a minority who did want it).

I agree, it should be subscriber-only.  While that will not eliminate 
abuse, it will help.  And I would bet money that it will happen 
eventually, it's just a question of when.

>> FreeBSD mail admin(s) actually do a pretty good job.  These are very
>> old, very well known open lists and the spam rate is very low.
>
> Yes. Thanks to postmaster at freebsd team :-)

That is true.  With almost no recognition, they do a difficult and 
tedious job.  If it wouldn't add to the workload, I'd suggest sending 
them a thank you note. :)