*From: *Willy Tarreau <w...@1wt.eu> *Sent: * 2014-09-05 11:19:22 EDT *To: *Ghislain <gad...@aqueos.com> *CC: *Mark Janssen <maniac...@gmail.com>, david rene comba lareu <shadow.of.sou...@gmail.com>, Colin Ingarfield <co...@ingarfield.com>, haproxy@formilux.org <haproxy@formilux.org> *Subject: *Re: Spam to this list?
> On Fri, Sep 05, 2014 at 04:32:55PM +0200, Ghislain wrote: >> hi, >> >> this is not spam but some bad behavior of a person that is >> inscribing the mail of this mailing list to newsletter just to annoy >> people. >> This guy must be laughing like mad about how such a looser he is but >> no spam filter will prevent this, there is no filter against human >> stupidity that is legal in our country. > That's precisely the point unfortunately :-/ > > And the other annoying part are those recurring claims from people who > know better than anyone else and who pretend that they can magically run > a mail server with no spam. That's simply nonsense and utterly false. Or > they have such aggressive filters that they can't even receive the complaints > from their users when mails are eaten. Everyone can do that, it's enough > to alias haproxy@formilux.org to /dev/null to get the same effect! > > But the goal of the ML is not to block the maximum amount of spam but to > ensure optimal delivery to its subscribers. As soon as you add some level > of filtering, you automatically get some increasing amount of false positive. > > We even had to drop one filter a few months ago because some gmail users > could not post anymore. > > I'm open to suggestions, provided that : > > 1) it doesn't add *any* burden on our side (scalability means that the > processing should be distributed, not centralized) > > 2) it doesn't block any single valid e-mail, even from non-subscriber Have it ever been tried enabling a spam filter in a dry-run mode? Run it for a year, and just have it add a header indicating whether it would have blocked the message. Then see if any legitimate messages would have been blocked. I also want to point out that the mailing list itself sometimes lands on various blacklists because of the amount of spam coming from it. So now users using mail providers subscribing to these blacklists are not just not losing a few messages, they're losing every message. > > 3) it doesn't require anyone to resubscribe nor change their ingress > filters to get the mails into the same box. > > 4) it doesn't add extra delays to posts (eg: no grey-listing) because > that's really painful for people who post patches and are impatient > to see them reach the ML. In the past you stated that you have grey-listing enable ( http://marc.info/?l=haproxy&m=139748200027362&w=2 ), and here you're stating that you don't want it. Now I'm confused which is really the case. If indeed grey-listing is not enabled, why not enable it for non-subscribers? I'd bet that all the people sending patches are subscribed. > > I'm always amazed how people are anonyed with spam in 2014. Spam is part > of the internet experience and is so ubiquitous that I think these people > have been living under a rock. Probably those people consider that we > should also run blood tests on people who want to jump into a bus to > ensure that they don't come in with any minor disease in hope that all > diseases will finally disappear. I'm instead in the camp of those who > consider that training the population is the best resistance, and I think > that all living being history already proved me right. I would argue the opposite, this is 2014, we should have capable spam handling technologies. And indeed we do! The thing is that spam handling has to be handled on the original recipient of the email (haproxy@formilux.org). Once the message has been sent through a relay (the mailing list), many spam filtering capabilities no longer work (DNSBL, greylisting, SPF, etc). Thus it is the responsibility of the relay to do the filtering. > > I probably received 5 more spams while writing this, and who cares! Obviously quite a few people care. This is your list, and I respect that, but your opinion seems to be the minority. You've stated in the past that you don't like it when actions result in people unsubscribing from the list. How many people unsubscribe because they are tired of the spam? I know I barely pay as much attention to the mailing list as I used to because of the amount of spam. "Oh look, a message. SPAM. Oh look, a message. SPAM again..." -Patrick
