[Biojava-l] Virus in biojava email

[Geoff Purdy]

> (a) We investigate the possibility of anti-virus software at the SMTP 
> transport layer
> (b) Biojava-l goes from an open list to a moderated list with 
> volunteers 
> handling the non-member posts
> 
> Comments?

The members-only lists I subcribe to have a drastically lower level of
general spam.  If a subscriber doesn't want list traffic clogging their
inbox, they can simply edit the subscription options to disable mail
delivery while remaining a subscriber.

+1 for a members-only list


> -----Original Message-----
> From: chris dagdigian [mailto:dag@sonsorol.org]
> Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2002 3:53 PM
> To: David Huen
> Cc: biojava-l@biojava.org; root-l; 
> Sanyu.Kiruluta@celeradiagnostics.com;
> board-admin@open-bio.org; mailteam@open-bio.org
> Subject: Re: [Biojava-l] Virus in biojava email
> 
> 
> 
> Hi folks,
> 
> The best way to directly contact the people who run the various 
> open-bio.org servers and systems is to email 
> "root-l@bioperl.org" - that 
> is the mailing list that all the various admin types monitor.
> 
> Regarding the specific situation: people hitting the list 
> with viral email.
> 
> You folks are the lucky ones :) I'm the one who gets 110+ 
> autoresponder 
> replies from corporate virus scanners that find the virus and bounce 
> back nasty error messages to the admin address. Each viral email sent 
> out causes my inbox to be flooded with a few hundred "you've 
> got virus 
> X" replies. ack.
> 
> My preferred approach is to investigate the possibility of 
> finding some 
> sort of anti-virus scanner that will tightly integrate with 
> our sendmail 
> daemon to scan inbound and outbound SMTP traffic. If anyone has any 
> suggestions to make regarding particular products or technologies 
> (commercial or open source) then please email me directly or 
> send your 
> message to the root-l mailing list.
> 
> That said the people who participate on this list are the ones who 
> should get to collectively decide how it is run and operated. If the 
> biojava-l people can get together and decide that they want 
> to turn off 
> the "anyone can post" feature than I'd be happy to do so.
> 
> I'd counter with the following proposal however:
> 
> biojava-l becomes a "members only" list with all external mails 
> quarantined by the listserver moderation software
> _BUT_
> several biojava-l members offer/volunteer to collectively join the 
> Mailteam so that non-spam, non-viral posts of interest can 
> get moderator 
> approval in a timely fashion.
> 
> So we basically have 2 options:
> 
> (a) We investigate the possibility of anti-virus software at the SMTP 
> transport layer
> (b) Biojava-l goes from an open list to a moderated list with 
> volunteers 
> handling the non-member posts
> 
> Comments?
> 
> Sanyu - you can tell from this message that we are not going 
> be able to 
> fix the problem today. Go ahead and unsubscribe.
> 
> Regards.
> Chris
> 
>