Hi all, I said that some time ago I had plans for testing a non-intrusive anti-spam solution. So here's what we're doing now. All e-mails to formilux.org pass through haproxy.com's anti-spam filters and are then rerouted to the mailing list server. That way we're performing an external cleanup without changing the way we manage the list for day to day operations, and nobody needs to resubscribe nor change whatever address filter they may have.
The filters *do not* remove any e-mail. Instead they're just scored and tagged with [SPAM] in front of the subject. From what we're observing on our work addresses, we have a few false positives from time to time, but with a low score. I don't want to block anything at all for now, so you should receive a bit more spam, but tagged as such. After some observation period, we'll figure a reasonable score threshold to reduce the noise while avoiding false positives. We'll add some margin and will be able to block the incoming e-mails reaching us with very high scores (the most boring ones). Those who don't want to see any mail tagged as spam will simply be free to set up a filtering rule to block any e-mail whose subject starts with [SPAM] and that will be all. Those who are not bothered by this will continue to receive a few low-score e-mails tagged as such, sometimes valid, sometimes spam. That's what I'm doing at work and it doesn't cause me any trouble. If you notice that some of your e-mails can't get through anymore, or anything unusual, please contact me so that we can troubleshoot. Normally this should not happen since we've been working fine with this solution for a few months now. Last important point. Both HAProxy Technologies and the people in charge for the e-mail infrastructure are offering this service to us FOR FREE, so in return I don't want to bother them at all with tweaking requests, and that's why we have the freedom to take actions based on the scoring. So needless to say that non-constructive comments or suggestions to make lazy people's life even easier will directly feed /dev/null (and also /dev/zero to avoid any jealousy). Best regards, Willy PS: hoping this e-mail will not be tagged, that would be a fun start :-)
