- From: Gerald Oskoboiny <gerald@w3.org>
- Date: Tue, 8 May 2001 03:43:15 -0400
- To: "William F. Hammond" <hammond@csc.albany.edu>
- Cc: www-talk@w3.org
On Sat, Apr 28, 2001 at 11:45:00AM -0400, William F. Hammond wrote:
> > the usefulness of email go down. My personal inbox usually has a ratio
> > of about 3:1 of spam:useful mail. This is probably going to get worse
>
> I'd say that about half of the spam that I receive is from list
> servers that fail to filter it out. (Much of the other half is
> indirectly attributable to my list and newsgroup participation.)
>
> The W3C lists would benefit greatly from filtering. Of course, human
> filtering, though slightly expensive, is the best.
I maintain www-talk (and www-html and a few others), and all
the lists that I maintain are configured to bounce mail from
non-subscribers to me for manual processing.
However, in this case the spammer actually bothered to subscribe
to our lists before posting, so their spam got through :(
Sometime in the future I hope to add a feature to our mailing list
software to allow our lists to be configured to require approval
for the first few messages from each new participant, then spammers
wouldn't be able to sign up for lists with new disposable addresses
and use them to spam a bunch of people right away. (and hopefully
this would reduce the amount of off-topic discussion as well.)
misc notes on list software and spam filtering:
http://impressive.net/people/gerald/2000/03/list-software/
http://impressive.net/people/gerald/2000/12/spam-filtering.html
(sorry I didn't deal with this incident sooner, I have been
travelling for the last few weeks with intermittent net access)
--
Gerald Oskoboiny http://www.w3.org/People/Gerald/
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) http://www.w3.org/
tel:+1-613-261-6630 mailto:gerald@w3.org
Received on Tuesday, 8 May 2001 03:43:56 UTC