Date: Sun, 23 Jun 2002 05:13:48 -0700 From: "Philip J. Koenig" <pjklist@ekahuna.com> To: Ruben de Groot <fbsd-q@bzerk.org> Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Spam problem on the list (Was: Re: URGENT) Message-ID: <20020623121347865.AAA672@empty1.ekahuna.com@pc02.ekahuna.com> In-Reply-To: <20020623131923.A42352@ei.bzerk.org> References: <20020623074218749.AAA684@empty1.ekahuna.com@pc02.ekahuna.com>; from pjklist@ekahuna.com on Sun, Jun 23, 2002 at 12:42:18AM -0700
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On 23 Jun 2002, at 13:19, Ruben de Groot boldly uttered: > On Sun, Jun 23, 2002 at 12:42:18AM -0700, Philip J. Koenig typed: > > > Date: Fri, 21 Jun 2002 15:50:55 +0200 > > > From: Ruben de Groot <fbsd-q@bzerk.org> > > > From /etc/motd (what every newbee will read after the first successfull > > > installation): > > > > > > If you still have a question or problem, please take the output of > > > `uname -a', along with any relevant error messages, and email it > > > as a question to the questions@FreeBSD.org mailing list. > > > > > > I consider this an excellent service provided by FreeBSD. > > > > > > It may be an "excellent service" to some minority of FreeBSD users, > > but we all thought having open SMTP relays was an "excellent service" > > too, back in the innocent years before the explosion of spam. > > > > Already at least one new user that I saw gave up after one day of > > being on this list because of all the junk on it, and I also know > > that some users in certain parts of the world consider it to be a > > major problem to receive large parcels of junk - in many cases this > > costs them real money due to usage costs. > > But you don't have to be subscribed to the list to ask a question. If > your connection doesn't allow you to receive large amounts of email, > junk or not, you can just submit your question without subscribing, and > you will only receive answers from that thread. This is what I mean by > "excellent service", it's a lot like what you get from a commercial > support contract, only run entirely by volunteers who are on the lists. Let's put it this way: even Windoze mailing lists aren't as a rule setup to allow anyone in the world to post - newbies or not. If Windoze newbies are clueful enough to figure out how to join a list in order to post a question, why aren't our supposedly more clueful FreeBSD newbies? And what is the point of posing a question to the list without being there to read the answer? Is there some rule that everyone that answers a question on -questions has to cc: the original poster? What about those who don't feel like it, or forget? On Usenet, after many years of experience and refinement, people ended up in near- universal agreement that to post a message and then just ask people to email you the answer (because you're too lazy to read the group) is considered rude and bad form. I think if someone doesn't feel like joining the mail list, they should just post a message somewhere like comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc instead. (speaking of - is there such thing as a bidirectional Usenet gateway for any of these "official" groups? Personally, I almost universally prefer the Usenet format for many reasons, including the fact that it eliminates this "subscription" issue altogether, and because the client software is almost universally far superior, resulting in something much easier to navigate and participate in.) > > I am on at least 8 other mailing lists that allow user posting and > > FreeBSD-Questions is the ONLY one that I see this problem on! > > (including the other FreeBSD lists I subscribe to) > > I am also subscribed to several closed mailing lists, and they do have > less spam sent directly to the list (although even on the > freebsd-questions list this has never been more than about 5% of the > total volume in my experience). Yesterday or the day before I must have received at *least* 1-2MB of pure junk from freebsd-questions - 95% of 5-6 digests in a row were pure spam, viruses or antivirus auto-replies. > On the other hand, spammers do subscibe > to these mailing lists as well so as soon as I post a message to any of > these lists, the email address I used will be harvested and get spammed. > This amounts to the majority of spam I receive and has nothing to do > with the list being open or closed. That's a different issue, and not something I brought up. (personally I use a separate address for lists, and when it gets on too many spammer lists, I just retire it or use it as a spamtrap. Same for Usenet, etc.) > Also on these other lists I have seen members hit by virusses and > spamming the list with virus-infected emails, just like recently on > freebsd-questions. I have never seen it to the extent I have seen it here. > > Either there should be some virus-scanning mechanism deployed > > (something several of the lists I'm on do), something should be done > > about moderation (ie assign several people the ability to temporarily > > block traffic from certain senders) or the idea of allowing posting > > from anywhere should be reconsidered. > > I agree on all but your last option, for reasons I gave above. > The problem here I think is not what should be done, but what can be > done. For example I believe the list allready is moderated (sometimes > certain senders do get blocked), but as everything in FreeBSD this is a > volunteers effort, and noone probably has the time to monitor the list > 24x7 so the mechanism is far from watertight. If I am right and the > situation can be improved by having more people monitor the list, I > would be happy to spent some of my time helping out here. Thus my suggestion that others help out. You can't expect jmb to monitor every list 24x7 looking for junk to block. Imagine what slashdot would be like with a single moderator?!? > The other option you gave, scanning for virusses, should indeed be > considered. But installing a virus-scanning mechanism on an allready > heavy loaded server like hub.freebsd.org is not something you do > overnight. It is highly likely that it will require a hardware upgrade > just to handle the extra load from the virus scanning processes (I speak > from experience here) and who is going to pay for that? Well I am aware of that as well - and as one of the previous posters suggested, a simple solution to that problem is just to disallow file attachments of any kind. Many lists do this. Once again, I really really doubt there's any real need to allow file attachments. If its a config file it should just be put into the body of the message. People like myself who only subscribe to digests can't do much with these attachments anyway. (without aggravating effort, at least.) All a large file attachment does for people like me who only subscribe to the digest, is make it incredibly annoying to scroll through the digest looking for text to read. -- Philip J. Koenig pjklist@ekahuna.com Electric Kahuna Systems -- Computers & Communications for the New Millenium To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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