[DAS] DAS & cuban cigars and porn offers

[chris dagdigian]

Hi folks,

Speaking as one of the Open Bio mailteam members...

Bioperl people keep their list pretty much wide open by common 
consensus. The biojava-l people have taken a slightly more hard-edge 
tactic: they've agreed to block all list messages that are not of 
mime-type text/plain. This catches lots of spam but also tends to upset 
clueless Outlook users who send me nasty emails asking me why their 
message was held for moderation.

You folks can do whatever you like although if you want to take the list 
and make it "members post only" or "moderated" then I'd have to ask for 
list members to step up and volunteer to handle the increased 
administrative duties that this will cause us. Interested volunteers 
just need a web browser to approve/deny/discard any messages that get 
caught up in the moderator's queue.

If you want to block all non text/plain messages then I can do this 
pretty easily at the mailman level. It won't stop all spam but would 
probably help a little bit.

There is a better solution in the works. We expect to transition to a 
solaris 8 platform later on this month for web and email services. Once 
we do that I plan on installing additional antispam tools (we already 
subscribe to the www.mail-abuse.org blackhole lists) such as spamassasin 
and vipul's razor etc. etc.

We will also be rolling out gateway-level anti virus tools that will 
scan all inbound and outbound emails. We can't do this now because 
finding product that support linux-on-alpha is a bit of a pain.

So- let me (or root-l@Bioperl.org) know if you want to make any changes 
to this list. Otherwise just hang on for a month or two and things 
should get better once we are on the new Sun hardware.

Regards,
Chris



Titus Brown wrote:

>-> I think it's time for this mailing list to be administrated...otherwise
>-> time to unsubscribe....too much junk mail. Is some action to be taken?
>
>It looks like the spammers are forging e-mail from e-mail addresses that
>are allowed to post to the list -- for example, if someone forged an
>e-mail from you, it would go through.  Most spam isn't getting through,
>I'd bet.
>
>Mailman has a nice moderation system, but it's kind of annoying to have
>to moderate a discussion list.  I'd rather keep it this open; I get ~40
>pieces of spam a day, and there are other ways to flag or get rid of it...
>
>--titus
>_______________________________________________
>DAS mailing list
>DAS@biodas.org
>http://biodas.org/mailman/listinfo/das
>  
>


-- 
Chris Dagdigian, <dag@sonsorol.org>
Independent life science IT & informatics consulting
Office: 617-666-6454, Mobile: 617-877-5498, Fax: 425-699-0193
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