Re: [Caml-list] posting policy and spam

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

>  are you sure of your diagnosis?

You mean, my lack of diagnosis? :-)

>  I am asking since the spam messages I have received from caml-list
>  were marked correctly by spam-oracle as spam:
>  IMHO, the conclusion is that spammers have not become smarter.
>  Simply there is something wrong with the INRIA procmail and the X-Spam:yes
>  messages are no longer filtered out.

You're probably right, and I think I found the problem.  It's a year
2004 problem, or more exactly a New Year's problem: the mailbox where
spam is saved is suffixed by the year, and for some reason procmail
couldn't create the "2004" mailbox on Jan 1st.  

I think I've fixed the problem, and I went back to the previous
posting policy: everyone can post, and SpamOracle filters the spam.
Let us wait for a couple of days and tell me if the spam problem
persists.  (I didn't notice it myself because of my own filtering on
my mail.)

Still, spam filtering is getting increasingly harder.  The latest
fashion among spammers is to pad messages with lots of randomly-chosen
words, which gives Bayesian spam filters a really hard time...

For this reason, it might be necessary in the future to go back to a
"subscribers only" posting policy.

Thanks for the quick feedback.

- Xavier Leroy

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