[Bioperl-l] recent spams to bioperl-l

[Aaron J. Mackey]

My 2 cents: the spam level has increased noticeably, but going from 0 
to some is always noticeable.  I don't think it's so bad (yet) as to 
require moving to a closed system.

We could also do what a few other mailing lists have tried, requiring 
emails to contain some valid keyword(s), e.g. "BioPerl" or just "Perl" 
or "Bio", bouncing back the few valid posts that don't match the 
keyword with a friendly "please click here to approve your post" or 
"please include the magic keyword in your posts".

And thanks again, Chris, for all your work keeping us up and running 
smoothly.

-Aaron

On Jan 22, 2004, at 7:37 AM, Chris Dagdigian wrote:

>
> Hi folks,
>
> Just wanted to apologize for the rise in spam going to bioperl-l. Our 
> anti-spam filtering tools on the open-bio.org mailserver generally do 
> a great job weeding out the dozens of messages per day sent to 
> bioperl-l that are obvious spam, but recently there has been a huge 
> rise in plaintext ASCII spam or the hash-busting spam that is nothing 
> but nonsense.
>
> Spamassassin+MimeDefang and our Mailman spam filters can't easily 
> discern the plaintext spam from regular email messages sent to the 
> list.
>
> bioperl-l allows non-members to post to the list; this was the 
> consensus behavior that bioperl members wanted the last time we took a 
> poll.
>
> Let me know if opinions have changed. If we make the list members-only 
> for posting we can significantly cut down on spam. The downside to 
> this is that we (a) make more work for the list moderators and (b) we 
> become 'less open'.
>
> -Chris
>
> -- 
> Chris Dagdigian, <dag at sonsorol.org>
> Independent life science IT & informatics consulting
> Office: 617-666-6454, Mobile: 617-877-5498, Fax: 425-699-0193
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>
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