[R] R-help going to become "subscriber-only"

[Martin Maechler]

Dear R-help mailing list readers,

After some discussion among R foundation members (and friends),
we have agreed that ``the spammer mafia (*)'' has momentarily won a
battle:

After more than ten years of open and free mailing lists devoted
to R (development, use, etc),
the increasing volume of spam {quadrupling within one year, I'm
told by an expert} and the slickness of the spam programmers
have lead to regular leaking of spam messages into R-help (and
other mailing lists).  Even though our filters catch > 99.9%
(probably even > 99.99%) of all the spam, our mail server has
now occasionally been blacklisted because of the R-help spams.

The consequence of this will be that .. before the weekend ..
only __e-mail addresses__ subscribed to R-help will be allowed to post to
R-help without any moderation, and we are even considering outright
rejection all non-subscribers, these latter decision coming
later.

Consequence: 
   Please subscribe to R-help __ at least in digest mode __
   now, and ``spread the word''
   so that you will be able to continue asking questions 
   and getting advice here.

Martin Maechler, ETH Zurich

... a sad list administrator 
    looking back to the good old times ...

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(*) I've been told that "Mafia" is quite correct here:
    Spammer-programmers who want to leave the business are
    life-threatened; CIOs of big anti-spam organizations are
    getting threats...