[R] Off topic:Spam on R-help increase?

[Douglas Bates]

On 3/6/07, Bert Gunter <gunter.berton at gene.com> wrote:

> In the past 2 days I have seen a large increase of  spam getting into
> R-help. Are others experiencing this problem? If so, has there been some
> change to the spam filters on the R-servers? If not, is the problem on my
> end?

There has indeed been an increase in the amount of spam making it
through to the list.  We apologize for the inconvenience.  Regretably
we will not be able to do much about it until the beginning of next
week.

Martin Maechler is on vacation at present and I am administering the
lists until he returns.  Most of the time this works even though the
mail servers are in Zurich Switzerland and I am in Madison, WI, USA.
However, in the last two days we have had a surge in spam and quite a
bit of it is getting through the filters.

The filters are catching some of the spam.  I think the main
difference in the last two days has been that the level of spam to the
lists has increased but it could be that something has happened to the
filters too.

All the lists except R-help only allow postings from subscribers so
there should very little spam on the other lists.

This subscriber-only policy can be difficult for people like me who
receive email at one address but send it from another.  Either the
sender must remember to use the account that is registered for the
list or the list administrator must manually approve the posting.
Even worse, such a policy dissuades new useRs from posting because
they get a response that their message has been held pending manual
approval by the administrator.  Sometimes they react by reposting the
message, then re-reposting, then ...

We have avoided instituting such a policy on R-help because of the
level of administrative work that will be involved and our desire not
to dissuade new useRs from posting to the list.

However, if this keeps up we may need to reconsider.

I would ask for the list subscribers to bear with us until Martin
returns and can check on whether something has gone wrong with the
filters.