On Wed, 2002-08-21 at 20:26, Rev Simon Rumble wrote:
> This spam is getting pretty annoying.  Spam Assassin has caught all of
> it for me, so perhaps SLUG could stick that on it?

We've been using Spam Assassin for the last six months or so.  I believe
the threshold for moderation is currently set to 4.2, and anything over
8 or 9 or something is automatically discarded.  I think Jeff could give
more details there.

Between SA and some absolutely evil regexes in mailman, we do end up
throwing away most of the crud.  According to the archive page, I've
counted around 10 or so spam mails this month  (it was a quick count,
and mildly subjective.  Don't flame me).  An equally quick count of the
slug-admin mail I've received shows us discarding something like 120
spam mails.

Compared to last month, even, where the ratio was closer to 30% of spam
hitting the list, I think the efforts from Tom, Mary and Jeff are paying
off.

As far as I'm aware, though, or SA setup is fairly stock.  If you're
catching stuff we're missing, it'd be much cooler if you could give us
some tips instead of gloating about it.

> GLLUG does this
> and simply tags it in the headers for people to decide whether to
> filter or not.  Course, we can all just run Spam Assassin ourselves.

I'm not actually sure if SA on the slug box is adding headers, or if
it's my mail server putting them there.  Like I mentioned above, though,
mails that exceed the SA threshold are automatically moved to the
moderation queue.  Really excessively spammy ones are automatically
discarded.  And I mean *really* excessively spammy.  I don't think it's
actually happened yet.

> The other, more draconian, option is to only allow posting by
> subscribers.

I think it's also worth noting that, in the four months or so I've been
on the slug-admin list, about the only false positive (non-spammy) mail
that's been held happened while I was messing with said evil regexes. 
While I'd love to, just once, approve something in the moderation queue,
I'm not sure the already over-worked admins would be able to keep the
mail coming out in a timely manner.

The merits and evils of subscriber-only posting have been thrashed out
both here and on slug-chat many times, and the opinion of the archives
seems to be that the increased risk of spam is worth the convenience and
accessibility of what most people still consider to be a great resource.

-- 
Peter Hardy
SLUG Secretary
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

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