Re: Any ideas how to stop SPAM on our list ??

From: Markus Hitter (mah@jump-ing.de)
Date: Tue May 13 2003 - 11:19:23 EEST


Am Montag, 12.05.03 um 22:31 Uhr schrieb Rafael Santillan:

> Does any body  have an idea how to create a new list free of this or
> move our list to a more secure place !.

I don't think this would help anything. Rapid Dude and friends have
done great work so far. Don't underestimate the challenge of feating
spam ...

Am Montag, 12.05.03 um 23:27 Uhr schrieb Blasch, Larry:


>


>
>
> ... but it won't be read by the data mining robots that search for
> addresses to sell.

Look what my "data mining" plain email client already found ...

Am Dienstag, 13.05.03 um 00:03 Uhr schrieb Dan Medford:

> It IS possible! I think it would be a good idea for the RP server to
> apply a spam filter on their end. ... it would not be too difficult to
> eliminate most of them applying a few spam keywords.

rp-ml already already applies spam filtering methods. Rapid Dude
explained this nicely when they re-setup rp-ml about a year ago. ... if
you really think it's a question of "a few spam keywords", then you
probably have more experience on other fields.

One popular method to filter spam is to disallow HTML and attachments.
How whould the mail you just sent to the list then look like?

You guess it, I have my own suggestions:

1) password-protect the archives. This doesn't have to use some
subscribing mechanism, you even can write the password into the
login-dialog. Robots don't understand such dialogs. Here's an example:
<http://www.lists.apple.com/mhonarc/cocoa-dev> btw.
<http://www.lists.apple.com/cgi-bin/mwf/topic_show.pl?id=96>

To my own experience, lots of these data mining robots use mailing list
archives. I still get spam onto a mail address which I didn't use for
over two years now but which you can find in many public list archives.
To the mail address on my website (a mailto:... link) however, I've yet
to get more than a few.

If you look at the bottom of this sample spam, there seems to be the
address of a page of the rp-ml list archives:
rapid.lpt.fi/archives/rp-ml-current/0180.html Can't understand the rest
of the page, however.

2) Moderate messages from non list members. This involves some
additional work to the list maintainer, so we have to ask him nicely.
Members still whould post unmoderated.

While not the perfect solution, the work-to-improvement ratio should be
pretty good.

Let me know if I can help, too,

Markus Hitter

P.S.: Just for comparison: The editor of some eMail magazine (TidBits)
wrote about 21,000 spam eMails he received this year so far.

P.P.S.: If you don't like spam, please don't re-post it as a citation
when complaining about it. So far, this spam mail is multiplicated by
four ...

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Dipl. Ing. Markus Hitter
http://www.jump-ing.de/





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