[Bioperl-l] Urgent Reply. / spam to open-bio lists

[chris dagdigian]

We already pay mail-abuse.org to use both the RBL and RSS blackhole 
lists (excellent service BTW). That alone stops 90% of the spam. We 
can't stop more than that without having a human look at every message 
-- especially the Nigerian scam stuff which is usually sent by hand from 
a real email address.

If bioperl people want they can do what biojava-l collectively decided 
to do: hold for moderation any messages that are not MIME-encoded as 
text/plain.

Blocking all non-plaintext messages (and attachments) stops more spam 
but it also tends to  add to the administrative burden of the mailteam 
as someone has to look at the messages to decide if they go through. I'm 
also the person who usually gets stuck explaining to people why the HTML 
email they just sent to the list was held for moderation.

If people on this list wish I can make bioperl-l hold for moderator 
attention any messages that are not text/plain. Perhaps it's time we did 
this as there are close to ~900 current subscribers.

The ultimate solution of course is to make bioperl-l a 100% moderated 
list. That won't happen because we don't have the volunteers to handle 
the increased admin duties (plus lots of people oppose moderation on 
principal)

-Chris



Elia Stupka wrote:
> Hey guys,
> 
> without any sophisticated software can we just put a hacky script that
> blocks all the business urgent proposals from Nigeria? I am not at all
> allergic to spam, I just press the delete button, but it's getting to a
> crazy level...
> 
> Elia
> 


-- 
Chris Dagdigian, <dag@sonsorol.org>
Life Science IT & Research Computing Freelancer
Office: 617-666-6454, Mobile: 617-877-5498, Fax: 425-699-0193
Yahoo IM: craffi