spam

[Ken Case]

> Is someone doing something about the porn spam on this list
> lately?

Yes.  I've added some more spam-prevention rules that will filter  
out messages like the spam which we've received in the last few  
weeks.

Sadly, it's a difficult, on-going battle:  in the last week, we've  
managed to filter out 148 messages of spam before they were  
redistributed to our mailing lists--and that's just the messages that  
were filtered by our final mailing list spam filter!  (We also have  
some general anti-spam measures in place on our server that prevent  
many spam messages from being processed at all, and I don't know how  
many additional messages of spam that's managed to catch because we  
don't log those rejections.)

The final solution may be to require that people only post to our  
mailing lists from registered addresses, but that will require some  
inconvenience for our users (they'll have to register their  
submission addresses somehow before they can send mail to our lists)  
and is also a solution which would require some engineering time.   
I'm not quite ready to take that step yet, but I'm getting close...

				Ken