Posting restrictions on this mailing list (for spam control)?

[Robert Watson]

On Sun, 5 Nov 2006, Spadge wrote:

> Ross Finlayson wrote:
>> Am I the only person who's tired of all of the spam on this mailing list? 
>> Why is this mailing list not set up so that only subscribers to the list 
>> can post to it?  This has been standard mailing list procedure for several 
>> years now.
>
> Spam is annoying, for sure. But I think every now and then spamassassin, or 
> whatever system the board uses, dies, and on those days we get a bunch of 
> spam. Usually, though, it's fixed pretty quickly ... until the next time.
>
> It's quite possible that, as the list members aren't moderated, the sending 
> bots actually sign up. I'm not sure about this, though. I've not tested the 
> list with an unsigned address, either, but it's quite possible you do have 
> to be a member to post.

Once in a while, the spam filtering on FreeBSD.org keels over and the level of 
spam briefly increases until it's fixed.  Over the weekend, the FreeBSD.org 
hardware was relocated to a rolling rack in preparation for it to be moved to 
a different colo, since Yahoo! is vacating the current colo it's sitting in. 
Disruption of this type often results in a window where spamassassin isn't 
processing in-bound mail, so it bypasses spam filtering; I expect this is 
probably what happened with respect to a bump in the spam rate in the last day 
or two.

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge