Re: [gentoo-dev] Spam (was Re: Hey SEXY)

[Mark Bainter <mark-gt@cymry.org>]

Alan [alan@ufies.org] wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 27, 2002 at 02:12:31AM +0200, Henrik Treadup wrote:
> > I don't like the idea of closing this list. If you close it you will still 
> > have problems with spam in the open lists; user, newbie etc. A better way 
> > of doing things would be to filter out the spam completley on all the 
> > lists. 
> > There was an interesting thread about Bayesian spam filtering on slashdot
> > http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/09/17/1746248&mode=thread&tid=111
> > a while ago discussing Paul Grahams essay A Plan for Spam
> > http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html 
> > 
> > The  statistical approach described there would have filtered out all spam 
> > I have seen on this list so far. (How many non spam email contain the words 
> > 'dear' and 'madam' ?) 
> > 
> > You might wan't to check out ESR's implementation 
> > http://bogofilter.sourceforge.net 
> 
> Or filter the list through spamassassin before it goes out to mailman (or
> something like that).

                    Close the list      Filter the lists
False Positives          No                  Yes
100% effective          Yes                  No

Hrm...choice seems clear to me.  Filtering spam on a
mailing list is a bad idea.  It's one thing for an 
individual user to decide an acceptable level of risk
for false positives, it's quite another to choose that 
for an entire list.  Just my two cents.