[Rd] Spam to R-* list posters

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> Serguei Sokol <sokol at insa-toulouse.fr>
>>>>>     on Thu, 19 Apr 2018 13:29:54 +0200 writes:

 [...............]

    > Thanks Tomas for this detailed explanation.

    > I would like also to signal a problem with the list. It must be 
    > corrupted in some way because beside the Tomas'  response I've got five 
    > or six (so far) dating spam. All of them coming from two emails: 
    > Kristina Oliynik <kristinaoliynik604324 at kw.taluss.com> and 
    > Samantha Smith <samanthasmith317260 at kw.fefty.com>.


Well, that's the current ones for you.  They change over time,
and in my experience you get about 10--20 (about once per hour;
on purpose not exactly every 60 minutes) and then it stops.

I've replied to the thread  "Hacked" on R-help yesterday:
  https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2018-April/452423.html

This has started ca 2 weeks ago on R-help already, and today
we've learned that even  R-SIG-Mixed-Models  is affected.

I think I don't see them anymore at all because my spam filters have adapted.

Note that

1. This is *NOT* from regular mailing list subscribers, and none
   of these spam come via the R mailing list servers.

2. It's still a huge pain and disreputable to the R lists of course.

3. I had hoped we could wait and see it go away, but I may be wrong.

4. We have re-started discussing what could be done.

   One drastic measure would make mailing list usage
   *less* attractive by "munging" all poster's e-mail addresses.

-----

For now use your mail providers spam filters to quickly get rid
of this. .. or more interestingly and clearly less legally: use R to
write "mail bombs".  Write an R function sending ca 10 e-mails per
hour randomly to that address   ... ;-)  I did something like
that (with a shell script, not R) at the end of last millennium
when I was younger and the internet was a much much smaller
space than now...

Martin