>So the problem is not legitimate lists with Spam, but what looks like >fake lists that somehow made it to mail-archive.
That's exactly correct. This often happens when spam (with totally bogus headers) is sent directly from the spammer to Mail-Archive's inbox. >[...] it looks like, from my random clicking that the majority of the >3000 odd lists on the lists.html page belong to this category. [...] >it might turn off others and reflect badly on mail-archive, not >realizing that it's a great service. That's a good point, and archived spam can also artificially inflate the list count statistic on the front page. I checked, and the current time before a list is considered inactive (and dropped from the list of lists) is 150 days. There are ~3800 lists that meet that qualification. If I change the definition of inactive to 21 days, we drop down to ~2000 lists. Presumably the difference is mostly spam. Therefore, I am going to require activity with the last 21 days to make the list of lists. (The front page statistic is computed from a different measurement, and I will worry about fixing that later.) Please let me know if you see a qualitative improvement in the list of lists. I am not sure how else to purge those spam lists. From a basic "ls -ld" on all the message directories, I can see which lists have very few messages in a computationally inexpensive way (because the directory structure itself is small). Those are likely to be either spam lists, or new/low traffic legitimate lists. I'm not sure how to make good use of this information, in a way that isn't already covered by heightening the "active" requirement. I'm open to suggestions. -Jeff _______________________________________________ Gossip mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.mail-archive.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gossip
