[Caml-list] posting policy and spam

[Xavier Leroy <xavier.leroy@inria.fr>]

There have been several complains recently about spam getting through
the caml-list.

For your information, the list is filtered through SpamOracle, and the
posting address receives several hundred spams a day.  Due to spammers
getting more clever, the efficiency of the filtering went from perfect
to about 99%.  That's enough to let significant amounts of spam slip
through.

By popular demand, I just put the list in "subscribers only" posting
mode.  That should get rid of almost all spam.  (Keep in mind,
however, that a forged From address on a spam can match that of a list
subscriber; it happened in the past.)

The problem with the "subscribers only" policy is that many
subscribers receive the list at one address and post through another.
This will no longer work.  In the past, posts coming from
non-subscribers were run through a moderator.  Moderation is a boring
and time-consuming task for which we no longer have volunteers.

Consequently, all posts not coming from a subscribed address are now
summarily and irremediably discarded.  If your posts don't appear on
the list, that's why.  You need either to subscribe to the list with
the same address that you use for posting (see below for hints), or
adjust the From address in your posts so that it matches the
subscribed address.

Yes, this is a bit drastic, but there is no middle ground between
accepting too many posts (including spams) and rejecting too many
(including legitimate posters).  Pick your poison.

To finish, a few hints on using the caml-list manager:

Q1: How do I know which address I'm subscribed from?

A: Look at the "Received" headers in any message sent from caml-list.
If you're lucky, there will be a line 
  "Received from concorde.inria.fr ... for foo@bar.com"
or
  "Received from nez-perce.inria.fr ... for foo@bar.com"

In this case, your subscription address is "foo@bar.com".

Q2: How to change my subscription address?

A: Send a message to caml-list-request@inria.fr containing the
following two lines:

        unsubscribe caml-list old-address@foo.com
        subscribe caml-list new-address@bar.com

Note that this message can be sent from any mail address, not just 
old-address@foo.com or new-address@bar.com.  You'll receive a message
at new-address asking you to confirm your subscription.

- Xavier Leroy

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