Re: Lua List Spam

[Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo <lhf@...>]

>How is it that these spammers can be sending to the list anyways?

I'm really sorry for the spam in lua-l. I do have filters that do a pretty
good job but some spam does get through, unfortunately. I apologize for this.

The obvious solution is to restrict postings to subscribers. I'd like to do
this, but there are people who use more than one account, sometimes from
the same domain but their mailers are setup in a way the actual machine
name appears in their address. Another problem is that 313 people read
lua-l through Yahoo Groups and are not in our database here at Tecgraf. So,
restricting posting to subscribers would to exclude those 313 people at Yahoo.

The mailing list is managed by me, using a (pretty fast) list server written
in Lua that manages distribution and several scripts thar are run manually by
me to do administrative tasks (hence the response to administrative requests
in not immediate). Managing the list does take a huge chunk of my time, time
that would be much better spent working on Lua documentation, luac, the web
site, etc. I'm sorry but I don't have the time or energy to add features to
the list server, apart from occasionally adding one more line to the spam
filter...

I've asked this here several times in the past, but I'll try again: can
someone install and manage a list server and host lua-l? Perhaps someone
already manages a list server and it's a matter of simply adding another list.
Ideally, it could be done at lua-users (that is, sourceforge), but I don't
know how good the sourceforge mailing lists are.

Now, there are some requirements before we can hand lua-l to a third party:

- The list must be spam-proof. This is easy by restricting posting to
  subscribers, but we'll have to ask the 313 people at Yahoo to subscribe to
  the new address. Actually, simply having a new address should cut the spam
  to nil until the posting address becomes available in the web (that was our
  original sin with lua-l at tecgraf -- the complete email address used to
  appeared in plain text and mailto: link in our web site).

- The list must be fast. Currently, lua-l runs in a machine that is a
  dedicated mail server. Our list server delivers each posting to 480 people
  very fast indeed (it creates a sendmail process for each 3 subscribers).
  The previous list manager we had, majordormo, used a single sendmail
  process for all subscribers and so if the mail server had problem
  contacting one subscriber, the whole distribution stopped. I don't know how
  mailman works, except that it's written in Python :-) On the other hand,
  our list server is sometimes too fast and you get several answers to the
  same question, although this hasn't been a real problem at all in lua-l.
  So I still think that speed is a good and key requirement.

- The list must be robust: the list server must not die and have to be
  restarted, the machine that hosts it must be accessible at all times if
  possible (which is not true of our mail server here, because of power
  failures and maintenance at PUC-Rio during weekends). Postings must not be
  lost.

- The list must be archived locally and the archives must be available for
  download. Digests would be a nice plus, because it would allow people from
  Yahoo to move to the new server.

I'd like to hear from volunteers for this. Thanks.
--lhf