Re: Newsgroups and mailing lists (was Re: Slightly OT: Why all thespam?)


"Steve Holden" <steve@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:f36kc1$hq3$2@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
| I *did* try to explain all this a week or two ago. Did I not make myself
clear?

I could ask the same. Quoting from that post:

| All I am saying is that it's difficult to catch *everything* when so
| much of the content comes in via Usenet. These posts never touch any
| python.org infrastructure before being incorporated into the newsgroup
| content on servers all over the world.

I am completely aware of that. But *I* am talking about posts which I
believe *do* touch python.org on the way to gmane. And please note that I
asked for (but have not gotten a response to) verification of that belief
before complaining .

| Looking at the headers in one of the messages you were writing about it
| appears they are being posted from Google groups, so maybe you could
| complain to them. Good luck with that ;-).

I think most everything I have looked at recently came from Google groups
or Google mail. Perhaps they considered themselved immune from the usenet
death penalty of being cutoff from the rest of usenet for not controlling
their own spammers. Or, I suppose, perhaps their current resources are
overwhelmed. In either case, being from Google should be a point toward
spamishness.

| The Python list managers know what they are doing,

Things were fine on the gmane side until a few months ago. Then what they
knew started to slip, it seems.

| and they *do* keep a huge amount of spam off the list.

I have previously thanked them publicly.

| The occasional piece gets through

For the past several months, it has been several a day, not 'the occasional
piece ... from time to time'. Much was repeated (>1/day) leftist political
postings from the same sources WITH SUBJECT LINES IN CAPS, MAKING THEM VERY
NOTICEABLE to even the most cursory scan, whether by person or program.
*If* it was indeed coming thru py.org, they I would have expected it to
have been stopped (or stopped sooner).

This discussion group, with its three versions, is one of the public faces
of Python. A dirty, junky group is bad public relations for Python. When
the current spam wave started, nobody said much for a couple of months at
least. I, and perhaps others, expected the 'we know what we are doing'
system to respond. These 'why spam' threads only started when it did not
seem to. They constitute fair and valid public feedback.

I notice today that there is no spam in 80 messages. A good sign I hope.

Terry Jan Reedy





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Relevant Pages

  • Re: Spam on usenet
    ... says that Google Groups is the conduit for a lot of spam hitting usenet. ... But the spam was getting to me. ... followed its instructions and added a filter to Newswatcher: ...
    (rec.music.classical.guitar)
  • Re: Alt.coffee is dead; long live alt.coffee (somewhere else)
    ... There's growing talk of a UDP (Usenet Death Penalty) ... Google is the worst spam source ... Even better would be if they broke google groups, ...
    (alt.coffee)
  • Re: Google Groups Likely Blocked
    ... trust anyway, censoring Usenet? ... Since virtually all Usenet spam originates from Google Groups accounts, in these cases Google Groups is acting as an endpoint, not a simple pass through. ... We complain to $isp admin aous spam originating from $isp. ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: SPAM is killing this newsgroup!
    ... haven't been affected by spam yet while others are under attack.. ... USENET and the rest of the precursors of internet. ... Then Google bought the usenet archives and went into the ... spammers found google groups and understood each active group ...
    (sci.electronics.design)
  • Re: Yap sometimes hangs making fonts
    ... list, allowing it to be read, posted to, and archived as a Usenet ... and dodge the spam, as well as isolate their activities there from ... right to prefer a mailing list over a newsgroup. ... various mailing lists into groups that are basically indistinguishable ...
    (comp.text.tex)