Jeff, At first I thought this complaint was bogus (sorry roger), but I then went to http://www.mail-archive.com/lists.html and clicked randomly on lists and saw what's described here. Almost every list that I clicked on had only a few messages and they all looked like spam.
So the problem is not legitimate lists with Spam, but what looks like fake lists that somehow made it to mail-archive. And it looks like, from my random clicking that the majority of the 3000 odd lists on the lists.html page belong to this category. I suspect that it's not a really big problem, because most people know which lists they want and use the search to find them, but it might turn off others and reflect badly on mail-archive, not realizing that it's a great service. Regards, Dror On Tue, Nov 18, 2003 at 07:41:39PM -0800, Jeff Breidenbach wrote: > > I am CC:ing this to Mail-Archive's discussion list because it > is of general interest. > > >I clicked on a dozen lists on this page: > >http://www.mail-archive.com/lists.html > > > >For some reason, every one of them had only one or two messages archived and > >all those messages were SPAM :-/ > > > >Perhaps there is a way that you might sick Bogofilter or something on those > >and delete those lists from the archive. Just a thought and I don't know how > >to do it. > > Mail-Archive receives a lot of spam (along with lots of legitmate > mail). Spam messages typically have screwy headers and thus often get > archived as their own list. In general, I have the list of lists > ignore anything that is colder than a few months, which somewhat keeps > things under control. So the dozen archived spam messages you saw are > still kind of fresh, but will eventually for all practical purposes go > away on their own. > > Running a serious spam filter on incoming mail is too computationally > expensive (there is a lot of mail!) but it is an otherwise good > suggestion. Unfortunately I know from my own inbox that a lot of spam > these days is specifically designed to get around spam > filters. Anyway, while spammers are still the #1 risk for > Mail-Archive's longterm survival, things are not as bad as they > might seem at first glance. > > Jeff > > PS. An unfortunate side effect of archiving spam is that > sometimes people get confused. They receive spam, do > a web search, find out that Mail-Archive received the > same spam. The conclude that Mail-Archive is somehow > the source rather than a fellow victim and complain loudly. > Maybe I need to make another FAQ entry. > > _______________________________________________ > Gossip mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://www.mail-archive.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gossip -- Dror Matalon Zapatec Inc 1700 MLK Way Berkeley, CA 94709 http://www.fastbuzz.com http://www.zapatec.com _______________________________________________ Gossip mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.mail-archive.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gossip
