After having a near-perfect record of keeping out spam and virus email, one slipped through yesterday.
It's a good example of why mailing lists can't be auto-moderated. The current elaborate system requires heavy human moderation, and this message still slid past everything and was automatically approved. The message appeared to come from a subscribed user, so it passed the first check. (This is actually common: spammers and viruses use pairs of addresses from the same source, so evil mail is likely to come from someone you have heard of.) The message passed both ClamAV and SpamAssasin (although a compressed zip file should have triggered something). It didn't have any of the keywords that are configured in Mailman's "hold" rules. And finally, that user was approved for auto-post for messages that passed all of the previous rules. Please keep this event in mind before you complain that your message was held for moderation. 95-99% (depending on the day) of inbound mail to the mailing lists is immediately discarded as obvious viruses and spam. Only very low scoring mail from approved subscribers is eligible for auto-approval The rest is held for manual moderation. Only about 2% of those held messages are valid postings. That means about 50 messages manually discarded for each manually approved posting. And except for a few weeks scattered over the history of the list, I've been the sole or primary moderator. The bottom line is that we are considering a message board format to replace the mailing list. It would have required logins to post, and retroactive moderation to delete advertising and trolls. Any opinions? -- Donald Becker [EMAIL PROTECTED] Scyld Software Scyld Beowulf cluster systems 914 Bay Ridge Road, Suite 220 www.scyld.com Annapolis MD 21403 410-990-9993 _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
