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Oct. 14th, 2003
things that are annoying me today
Oct. 14th, 2003 02:13 pmI run a mailing list for a sourceforge project for which I'm nominally the lead developer - I say "nominally" since I tend to not do a whole lot other than acting as gatekeeper for user patches these days, modulo the occasional outbreak of actual development. The list is run on SourceForge's list server, which means it's a mailman-2.09-plus-unspecified-hacks list.
That's the first thing that irritates me. There are more recent versions of mailman with built-in spam-filtering, but alas I'm stuck with having the list set to members-only posting and that means that spam tends to end up in the admin box for me to deal with. I've written a mailman admin script to deal with this; it downloads messages, feeds them to SpamAssassin to check if they're spam or not, and nukes them if they are. Still, though, it's a pain in the ass that I have to do this in the first place.
Item the second is people who post regularly to the list without having subscribed, or post from an unsubscribed address, or in some other way force me to manually approve their posts. If you're on a member-posting-only list, and you post from different addresses, SUBSCRIBE THEM ALL. You can set all of them except one to not receive any mail, so you don't get multiple copies.
Item the third is back to spam again. Someone recently posted suggesting I should do random stuff in order to prevent them from getting spam from someone who's harvesting mail addresses off the list through the simple expedient of having subscribed to it. Aside from the fact that the random stuff in question is outside my control (since I can't modify the software that runs the list, nor the software that archives it), I simply don't care. 60% of the mail that hits my mailbox on a daily basis is spam, but I don't notice - aside from via the statistics - because I run spamfiltering software. There's no excuse not to. Sure, if you choose poorly you end up downloading all that crap anyway, but it's not my fault if you chose to use crap software, and the other people who use the list - or might want to use it in the future - shouldn't suffer because of your choices. I only switched the list to members-only posting under duress, as that alone raises the barrier to entry for new users to ask questions and leads to the other annoying thing mentioned above, people who keep posting from unsubbed addresses.
It's 2003. You will get spam. You can do two things: talk to your local political representative about anti-spam legislation, and use filtering software. The only way that spam will go away is if it becomes too expensive to support. And the only way that will happen is if (a) noone ever sees the spam, so the spammer gets zero advertising benefit and (b) there is legal recourse to prosecute spammers and prosecute them HARD. So quit whining and get to it already.
Oh, item the fourth is that I scratched the paintwork on the hood of my car while trying to extricate it from the office parking lot due to incautious placement of cars and a rubbish skip. BAH.
That's the first thing that irritates me. There are more recent versions of mailman with built-in spam-filtering, but alas I'm stuck with having the list set to members-only posting and that means that spam tends to end up in the admin box for me to deal with. I've written a mailman admin script to deal with this; it downloads messages, feeds them to SpamAssassin to check if they're spam or not, and nukes them if they are. Still, though, it's a pain in the ass that I have to do this in the first place.
Item the second is people who post regularly to the list without having subscribed, or post from an unsubscribed address, or in some other way force me to manually approve their posts. If you're on a member-posting-only list, and you post from different addresses, SUBSCRIBE THEM ALL. You can set all of them except one to not receive any mail, so you don't get multiple copies.
Item the third is back to spam again. Someone recently posted suggesting I should do random stuff in order to prevent them from getting spam from someone who's harvesting mail addresses off the list through the simple expedient of having subscribed to it. Aside from the fact that the random stuff in question is outside my control (since I can't modify the software that runs the list, nor the software that archives it), I simply don't care. 60% of the mail that hits my mailbox on a daily basis is spam, but I don't notice - aside from via the statistics - because I run spamfiltering software. There's no excuse not to. Sure, if you choose poorly you end up downloading all that crap anyway, but it's not my fault if you chose to use crap software, and the other people who use the list - or might want to use it in the future - shouldn't suffer because of your choices. I only switched the list to members-only posting under duress, as that alone raises the barrier to entry for new users to ask questions and leads to the other annoying thing mentioned above, people who keep posting from unsubbed addresses.
It's 2003. You will get spam. You can do two things: talk to your local political representative about anti-spam legislation, and use filtering software. The only way that spam will go away is if it becomes too expensive to support. And the only way that will happen is if (a) noone ever sees the spam, so the spammer gets zero advertising benefit and (b) there is legal recourse to prosecute spammers and prosecute them HARD. So quit whining and get to it already.
Oh, item the fourth is that I scratched the paintwork on the hood of my car while trying to extricate it from the office parking lot due to incautious placement of cars and a rubbish skip. BAH.
