"Chris" linuxbios@rebel.com.au writes:
Hi
I am new to this group and currently in the lurk stage
but can I pass a comment/suggestion.
I get a huge amount of spam, and on a cursory glance a lot of the mail from this group "appears" spammy
I am not saying it is, just that when you view the subject lines they often appear like subjects designed to foil filtering systems
Subject lines are for humans the other headers are for machines.
can I suggest a standard element be placed in the subject line such as I have done
that way it will be easier to seperate the linux bios mailings from the spam mailings
Look at the List-Id: that should be completely constant. That is what I filter by and it makes it trivial. I filter not to get rid of spam but to separate the LinuxBIOS mailing list traffic and the linux kernel mailing list traffic etc.
If you want something practically spoof proof ask for the mailing list to gpg sign messages. Then you can be certain the message at least came from the mailing list.
I have not seen any spam come through this mailing list. Or even spoofed as such.
If you really want to stop spam. Don't concentrate on the fact that it is unwanted mail. Concentrate on the fact that it is bulk mail, and that it is generally fraudulent. Detecting mail is passing in bulk or that it does not have a legitimate source do not sound like hard problems.
I am also a member of the ASRG "Anti Spam Research Group" and they use a system that looks like this
subject: [ASRG] 3: description
the number is for pre-organised topics such as 0 = general 1 = new ideas etc...
Things like that get extremely ugly when you cross post, or the mailing system does not recognize your Re: line so you get things like:
Re: [linuxbios] Re: [linuxbios] or: Re: [linuxbios] RE: flash_n_burn rom utils, /dev/bios, ... resquest
And we have a diverse enough crowd we don't get consistent recognition of the Re: line anyway. Yhlu I think posts with Chinese character set which makes things interesting.
Hacked subject lines just clutter up things up.
As for adding numbers for general categories that is just silly. If you want to describe what is going on feel free to add: [IDEA] or [PATCH] or whatever. Enumerations with numerical values are just silly when they are for human consumption. The next logical step is to progress forward to writing programs in machine code to give more control so they are not susceptible to viruses.
Eric