Messages in this thread | | | From | Julian Bradfield <> | Date | Fri, 20 Aug 1999 12:01:57 +0200 (MDT) | Subject | Re: Anti-SPAM Suggestion... |
| |
I would just like to add support to everything Mike Harris is saying.
I imagine this thread alone has already cost you all more time and effort than the spam, apart from the one poor soul who's actually dealing with it.
I speak as one who skims the list pretty regularly, via the archive at kernelnotes.org, but certainly doesn't want to get it in my mailbox. I also occasionally post to it, when I have a particularly awkward kernel problem or a possibly useful patch.
Any of the heavyweight solutions will just worsen my already rather bad record of remembering to tell anybody about problems and fixes. The "subscriber or put [lk] in subject line" is about the only automatic solution that seems lightweight enough. Moderating from non-subscribers is also fine, but requires people to do it (*reliably*).
I suspect that these attacks are not going to become much more frequent. When they do happen, it's obviously worth talking to the managers of the lists being subscribed to, and suggesting that they adopt the increasingly common "subscribe and then confirm with unique cookie" approach.
Incidentally, Riley Williams suggested that it is unusual, stupid, and little short of declaring oneself a spammer to use multiple email addresses. This is ridiculous. Anybody who has the benefit of a mail system allowing such a facility, and the nous to use it, does so. For example, if I were to subscribe to linux-kernel, I would do so as jcb+lk@dcs.ed.ac.uk . This *guarantees* that I can identify linux-kernel traffic to me, regardless of what the mailing list manager decides to put in the headers today, with no false negatives, and the possibility of false positives only if I happen to release that address somewhere else---which I would do if I actually *posted* as jcb+lk@dcs.ed.ac.uk. (Obviously that address is now "poisoned"...) I also do this when subscribing to online services: thus if they turn out to be mad spammers in disguise, I can just junk mail to that address for ever more, and not have to worry about it. This is far too useful a feature to dismiss as "only used by spammers".
Also, of course, I have active accounts on three or four different systems, but I only want mail to go to two of them.
- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
| |