List mechanics

[Matthias-Christian Ott]

"David Gerard" <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 23/01/2008, Bernhard Reiter <reiter at fsfeurope.org> wrote:
> > On Wednesday 23 January 2008 10:50, Alan Pope wrote:
>
> > > ..or anti-spam on the list server.
>
> > We also do this, but it does not catch everything.
>
>
> It's a very blunt instrument in my experience with Wikimedia lists.
> Our mail server assigns a spam score to everything that comes through,
> but it's amazing how low some spam scores and how high some human
> emails score. I tend to set high scoring mail to "discard" and a
> somewhat lower threshold to "hold for moderation". On lists where it's
> particularly important every human mail be read (e.g. Oversight-l, the
> alert address for deleting sensitive personal information from the
> wiki), I don't discard anything automatically.

I suggest to simply use a good spam filter and enqueue marked e-mails
in a separate queue which is maintained by a human, so "learning data"
can be collected and the false-positive rate can be reduced. I think
discarding e-mails is not useful.

But when using spam filters keep in mind that people who send spam
also use them for testing purposes and optimise their e-mails to pass
the filter.
But generally speaking I think the spam rate on the FSF Europe mailing
lists is quite low and if someone cleans the archive, I don't care about
less than 1% spam.

--
Matthias-Christian