[R] R-help "spam" detection; please help the moderators

[Joshua Wiley]

Hello Martin and Ted,

First off thank you to you guys and all the volunteers for providing
this wonderful service.  I have two questions.

1)  Do you know if it is a problem to respond to a post from nabble
using a gmail account?

2)  Would it be easier for you if people just used non free accounts?
I don't particularly relish the idea, but if it helped it would be
worth it.


Thanks again,

Josh


On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 6:25 AM, Martin Maechler
<maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch> wrote:
> Dear readers of R-help
>
> as most of you will *not* be aware, R-help has continued to work the
> way it does, only thanks to a dozen of volunteers,
> see https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help .
>
> The volunteers manually moderate e-mails that "look like spam" (and
> sometimes are and sometimes are not).
> While much more than 90% of the spam is filtered out long before
> a human sees it, with the increasing sophistication of spammers,
> manual intervention has deemed to be necessary and served the
> community very well.
>
> OTOH, in recent weeks, the amount of work for the volunteers has
> increased, mainly because an increasingly number of non-spam postings are
> erronously tagged as "possibly spam".
> We have discussed about this and done some analysis and found
> that most of these message that produce a considerable amount of
> extra work share two properties :
>  1) they are posted via Nabble  {which *always* attaches a small
>                                 pro-Nabble spam at the end of the message}
>  2) the e-mail address of the sender is from a freemail
>    provider, quite often 'at gmail dot com', and often the part
>    *before* the '@' (at-sign) ends with digits.
>
> We hereby ask those among you who use a freemail account to
> please no longer post via nabble.
>
> Thank you for your support of R-help, *the* "community mailing
> list" of the R project since even before that project existed
> "formally", namely since 1997-04-01,
> today 13 years and two months.
>
> Martin Maechler, ETH Zurich
> (and R-help creator and principal manager)
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>



-- 
Joshua Wiley
Senior in Psychology
University of California, Riverside
http://www.joshuawiley.com/