Just a thought: I don’t know anything about listserves so I don’t know if this
would be possible (or desirable), but could the listserve be set up to refuse
distribution of anything that didn’t include a certain word, such as
“unicycling” (plus whatever else), in the subject line?
-KH.
Kris Holm, B.Sc. Geologist, Forestry Group, EBA Engineering Consultants Ltd.
Suite 550, Sun Life Plaza, 1100 Melville Street, Vancouver, B.C. V6E 4A6
Tel:(604) 685-0275 Fax:(604) 684-6241 Email: kholm@eba.ca
Re: winternet and spam
> Some years ago we discussed the same topic. Then I made a suggestion that
> couldn’t be implemented due to technical restrictions resp. the realization
> would have been too much work. Maybe the technic has improved since then. So
> here it is again:
>
> Everyone who wants to post to this newsgroup has to add a subject line like
> “Uni: whatever”. Any posting with a subject line not starting with the phrase
> “Uni:” will be deleted automatically. So any spammers who don’t know this rule
> will have no chance bothering us.
>
> Is this a thing our newsgroup/mailing list server can handle?
>
> Wolfgang
>
Oddly enough I read the mailing list and not the newsgroup and I don’t get much
spam on the mailing list. I get lots of spam from other sources, but next to
none from the list. I do one thing that may help. I use a mail filtering program
to presort my mail into folders. I put the uni list into the unicycling folder,
the gnome list into the gnome folder, etc. Then if the mail is addressed to
beirne@neo.rr.com I put it in my inbox. Any mail left goes into my spam folder.
This isn’t fullproof, but is suprisingly effective. Sometimes good mail ends up
in the spam folder, but I generally expect it to be spam so I just do a quick
select of all of it and delete it. I use the procmail filtering program in
Linux, but programs like Eudora and Netscape have filtering capabilities, and I
assume others do too.
Another approach is to read the newsgroup via DejaNews
(http://www.dejanews.com). They do some spam filtering, and while not foolproof,
the amount of actual spam is minimal. I did a quick scan through al l the
message headers since February 1 and found 6 spam messages out of
224. Three of them at the same time were about boosting sex appeal, which might
have upset some people.
The only fool proof solution I know of is to have a moderator, but the cure
would be worse than the disease.
Beirne