[ILUG] Spam and more spam

[Niall O Broin]

On Tuesday 2 March 2004, colm at tuatha.org (Colm Buckley) wrote:

>I am willing to consider options for assisting with de-spamming the 
>ILUG list.
>
>Human moderation is an option, but it would probably destroy the 
>'real-time' nature which this list has come to enjoy.  The volume of 
>mail to the list is *enormous* - for every message which is currently 
>posted, about 5-10 are rejected as spam or viruses.  It is difficult 
>for even a large team of moderators to respond to such a volume in 
>short intervals.  In addition, I have always been uncomfortable with 
>the notion of human moderation of this list, on the grounds that even 
>the most objective individuals can be biased, and make decisions which 
>might not be acceptable.
>
>I also don't really want to consider complicated options which involve 
>a large or fragile software infrastructure.

As I deleted the n-th worm mail today (and I think that ILUG is the
source of all copies of the current worm which I have received) I was
thinking about this, and was talking about it to another couple of ILUG
members. Is it possible to have moderation only of messages from
non-subscribers? - I think SAGE-IE does this. That should then have
minimal impact on the real-time nature of the list. Moderation should
also be done on a very simple policy - if it's not spam or worm/viral,
it goes through, even if it is off-topic (this should remove the
judgmental aspects of moderation). 

Another very simple idea, which I guess could be implemented by a custom
SA rule, would be to check the content length, and reject on less than
some arbitrary size - 80 characters maybe ? This would have stopped all
of the current worm stuff.



Niall