[TFDA] Meta: spam overtaking the non-subscriber submission queue

Alan Hoyle alanh at email.unc.edu
Mon Nov 19 09:30:28 EST 2007


Hey all,

As some of you may be aware, back in September of 2005, we had a brief
flurry of spam that got through to the list.  At that time, I changed
the requirements for posting to the TFDA email list and non-subscriber
posts since then have gone through to a moderation queue.

http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/ultimate/2005-September/004143.html

Since that time, the level of spam sent to the list has been
increasing and at this time we're receiving something between 10-30
spams every day in the queue and legitimate emails get in there maybe
once/week.  Xian, Garrett and I have been emptying the queue regularly
and adding legitimate senders to the "bypass moderation" list.
However, because of the ever-increasing volume in the queue, I'm
becoming increasingly fearful that we'll have "false-positives" and
some non-spam email will end up rejected or discarded.  In addition,
the notification emails that get sent to us informing us of queue
entries now have a very high likelihood of ending up in our spam
folders and this delays the delivery of the legitmate emails.

In order to avoid this, I've become increasingly of the opinion that
we should change the moderation settings again so that ALL
non-subscriber email will be rejected.  While this will make it
incrementally more inconvenient for some to post to the list, it will
avoid these issues and lessen the burden on the moderators.

Note that the setting we would change would to change "Action to take
for postings from non-members for which no explicit action is
defined." from "Hold" to "Reject."  This means that email addresses in
the "List of non-member addresses whose postings should be
automatically accepted" will still bypass the moderation queue and get
to the list, we'll be able to add entries to that list by request, and
any future emails from other non-subscribers will receive a message
from the listserver informing them that their email has been rejected.

If anyone has strong opinions that we should not implement this
change, please let me know.  If you have funny things to say, you may
also send them to me.

-alan

-- 
   Alan Hoyle  -  alanh at unc.edu  -  http://www.alanhoyle.com/
     "I don't want the world, I just want your half." -TMBG
                Get Horizontal, Play Ultimate.


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