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

[Mathieu Roy]

Le lun 29 avr 2002 à  8h24, Martin Hamilton a écrit :
> "Mathieu Roy" <address@hidden> writes:
>
> | Hum, gnu adresses / mailing list should be accessible to everyone,
> not
> |
> | only to hackers. And "everyone" dont know how to change his message
> | headers or use GPG.
>
> Yep, agree completely.  Every hacker had to start somewhere...
>
> | This header stuff can be a real pain also for users who are not
> | everytime in the same place, using the same computer.
>
> Indeed.
>
> Do you have a counter proposal?
>
> What concerns me is that people are making their lists moderatedor
> moving
> away from gnu.org completely because of the spam problem.

I must admit that I dont see any perfect solution.

To me, it's acceptable to
        - filter known open relay smtp
        - filter message with korean and japaneses characters
        - filter message with a subject as "sex" "price"

I dont think that users should add something to theirs messages, normal 
users should have anything to do (I dont think that reading a HOWTO 
should be a prerequesite to get in touch with a project on his mailing 
list).

And I propose that the configurations files of spamassassin (if it's 
choosed) for fencepost are located on the CVS of a dedicated special 
project on savannah, fetched in a cron job. So it would be easy to add 
new rules if needed.

So what I propose is
	- to use spamassassin (or another one, but this one seems to 
works fine, I've rode favorables comments about it) to filter the spam 
messages ; dont require anything for the users do to something special
	- to have the configurations files located on a CVS so it would 
be easy to modify it, adapt it with the new tendancies ; and control 
the whole filtering process
	- maybe works also with a whitelist system (it seems that 
spamassassin provide it to)

I think it should solve the recurrent mailing list spamming problem.


Regards,

--
Mathieu Roy

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