Many of you were very polite and understand that maintaining the mailing
list is NOT my first priority, and to you I am grateful. Of the amount
of spam that is sent towards the list, very little of it has actually gotten
through. While I have not kept the junk around, a good rough estimate is
about 3 to 20 pieces of spam per week could be coming your way.
Vent mode on...
I'm somewhat amazed at some of the messages that I have recieved in regards
to some of the spam messages that came through the list recently. While I
thought this list was for "sun-MANAGERS", in some cases, I have to wonder
if it's not the "children of the sun" mailing list. Exagerations of how bad
the problem was amazed me. Someone claimed to be getting 12 spams per day
for days from the list. Others complained about the spammage, but gave NO
details, or stripped all the headers so as to make tracking impossible.
While I didn't need the extra messages, the tone of some of the messages was
far from civil. Since you ARE sun-managers, use the tools you have available
to complain to the REAL source of the problem. There was a posting to the
list as to how to do that. You need to remember though that the info in a
spam MAY be falsified, so be professional if at all possible.
Vent mode off...
I've made a change to the sun-managers list software so that it will now
drop anything that was addressed "To: sun-managers@eecs.nwu.edu", and several
other ancient forms of the sun-managers home. This should not have any effect
on the vast majority of you. Some of you will need to know the old addresses
will no longer work and you'll need to switch to the
"sun-managers@ra.mcs.anl.gov" address.
For example, the following addresses are no longer valid posting addresses.
sun-managers@rice.edu
has never been the home for the list, but has some history with the
sun-spots mailing list. I think the postmaster at rice at one point got
tired of telling people the proper address so just installed the forward.
sun-managers@eecs.nwu.edu
was the home for the list for many years, then the load of the list
became to high for the machine it was running on, so the list then
moved to ra.mcs.anl.gov. This was many years ago, and the kind people
at Northwestern have maintained a forwarding alias there to keep the old
address working.
The other main addresses that people use are associated with Usenet news groups.
I put filters in for this some time ago, but the spammage there continues
to flow. If there is anyone that can kill the addresses that UUNET has
for news group moderation, I'd appreciate it. Attempts to deal with their
customer support center have proven futile in the past. I don't want the
addresses changed, they should be REMOVED along with the news groups.
(Maybe just getting those news groups to not be "moderated" would be enough.)
saar-lists-sun-managers@uunet.uu.net
info-sun-managers@uunet.uu.net
The above 2 addresses are listed as the moderations for defunct news
groups. Still a number of "get rich quick" and "nude teen" spams
go to those lists weekly.
There were some suggestions to make the list be a "moderated" list.
That was the best laugh I'd had in some time. While I wouldn't mind
seeing the list moderated so as to reduce the noise on the list, I don't
think there is anyone that would want to take on the job. Remember this is
a quick turn around list, so messages should be approved as quickly as
possible, day/night/weekend/holiday/vacation not accepted time off.
A couple of suggestions came though to make the list be "private" where
only those directly subscribed to the list can post. While this may work
for some lists, the vast majority of the membership of the sun-managers
list is subscribed through local exploders. In this manner things are
able to be delivered quicker to more sites, with less overhead on the
maintainer as well. The down side of this becomes that there isn't a
master list of all subscribers. The next question becomes what to do
about the people with more than one email address that ARE subscribed
but not from the address they are active on at the moment?
--Gene
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:12:40 CDT