Spam

[Simon Marlow]

> Sorry to bother you with a message about spam.
>=20
> I have noticed two things about this mailing list:
>=20
> * Every once in a while, we get messages like "your e-mail
>   is under consideration for sending to the list". This
>   suggests that the mailing list is moderated, and that
>   there is some person deciding on what can and what cannot
>   be sent to the list.
>=20
>   (One could discuss wether it is a good idea to send these
>   messages to the whole list rather than just to the person
>   who sent them, but let us not discuss that here.)

The list is partly moderated: any message over a certain size, or with
too many destination addresses, or with certain keywords, gets held for
moderation.

The moderation messages you're seeing are caused by viruses (primarily
Win32.Klez) which spoof the sender address.  The virus messages are
always caught by the auto moderation, but sometimes the sender address
has been spoofed to be one of the other Haskell lists, so the moderation
message gets sent there.  Unfortunately causing these messages to be
caught by the moderator would lead to an infinite loop...

> * Very often, we get spam e-mail. This suggests that nobody
>   is moderating the list.

Spam is supposed to be caught by SpamAssassin on haskell.org.  It's
doing a pretty good job so far - I get far fewer messages to moderate,
but the occasional one does get through.

> These two observations are in contradiction with each other.
>=20
> Couldn't we allow list subscribers to submit to the list
> without problems, whereas non-list subscribers have to be
> approved by a list moderator?

I've resisted doing that because (a) I'm lazy and (b) lots of people are
subscribed to the list using addresses which are different from the ones
they post with, so we'd have to gradually build up a list of those
addresses which are allowed.

Well, maybe I'll give it a go for a while.  If it's too much hassle
expect an advertisment for the moderator's job soon...

Cheers,=09
	Simon