Re: [Savannah-hackers] How to fight spam on GNU mailing lists

[Mark H. Weaver]

I don't have much time to write now, but I wanted to add my two cents
to the SPAM issue.

I think it is very important for GNU to not turn to blacklists, nor to
treat certain domains as second-class citizens.  I also think it is
important not to make most of our mailing lists moderated.

Let's please consider a whitelist-based solution.  More specifically,
I think we should maintain a system-wide whitelist, which treats
everyone equally.  The first time anyone emails any domain local to
fencepost, their message will be frozen, pending a confirmation note
sent to them which they must reply to, to verify their authenticity.
If the verification note is replied to correctly, they are added to
the whitelist and all pending emails are thawed.

I suspect that this simple, non-discriminatory method will get rid of
most of our SPAM.

If this becomes a widely used practice, we will eventually need to
make the verification note hard to reply to without human intelligence
-- some kind of simple question to answer, which a program could not
do reliably.

I'll write more later, and I may also volunteer to implement this
method.

Thoughts?

        Mark