On 3/6/07, Bert Gunter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > In the past 2 days I have seen a large increase of spam getting into > R-help. Are others experiencing this problem? If so, has there been some > change to the spam filters on the R-servers? If not, is the problem on my > end?
There has indeed been an increase in the amount of spam making it through to the list. We apologize for the inconvenience. Regretably we will not be able to do much about it until the beginning of next week. Martin Maechler is on vacation at present and I am administering the lists until he returns. Most of the time this works even though the mail servers are in Zurich Switzerland and I am in Madison, WI, USA. However, in the last two days we have had a surge in spam and quite a bit of it is getting through the filters. The filters are catching some of the spam. I think the main difference in the last two days has been that the level of spam to the lists has increased but it could be that something has happened to the filters too. All the lists except R-help only allow postings from subscribers so there should very little spam on the other lists. This subscriber-only policy can be difficult for people like me who receive email at one address but send it from another. Either the sender must remember to use the account that is registered for the list or the list administrator must manually approve the posting. Even worse, such a policy dissuades new useRs from posting because they get a response that their message has been held pending manual approval by the administrator. Sometimes they react by reposting the message, then re-reposting, then ... We have avoided instituting such a policy on R-help because of the level of administrative work that will be involved and our desire not to dissuade new useRs from posting to the list. However, if this keeps up we may need to reconsider. I would ask for the list subscribers to bear with us until Martin returns and can check on whether something has gone wrong with the filters. ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.