Junk mail on Octave mailing lists

[John W. Eaton]

Sorry about the recent batch of junk mail on the lists.  It is not my
intent to have the lists used to distribute viruses, get-rich-quick
schemes, or other things not appropriate for the lists.

Also, sorry if you receive multiple copies of this message, but I
thought it would be best to send this to all the lists that have been
affected.

Up until now, we've been pretty lucky, and haven't had much trouble.
But perhaps the Octave lists have recently been included in some list
of email addresses distrbuted to spammers.  And recently we have also
been hit by some virus/worm that appears to propagate by sending
itself to addresses found in address books.

To try to prevent more of these problems in the future, I've modified
the mailing list rules so that to be able to post automatically, you
must post from an account that is recognized as being on the
distribution list.  Sorry if this causes trouble for you, but it is
one of the simplest and possibly most effective things I can do to
reduce the amount of junk on the lists.  Messages that are rejected
should be bounced to the moderator of the list (me) and I'll post them
if they are appropriate for one of the lists.  A message explaining
that the message was not posted will also be returned to the sender
explaining that they can avoid the moderator delay by subscribing.

Since requiring subscription to the list won't prevent the current
viruses that may be coming from people who are subscribed but who have
been hit by a virus/worm that forwards mail to everyone in their
address book (including our lists), I've also added some filters that
should reject the particular messages that have been going around in
the last few weeks.  If we are hit by other similar messages in the
future, we should be able to filter them as well, but unfortunately,
probably not until we've seen at least one example.

SmartList hole that allows people to avoid any checks and send
messages directly to the distribution list has also been closed.  Now
it should be much harder to bypass the mailing list management
software.

If you have questions, comments, or suggestions about better ways to
handle this problem, please feel free to send them directly to me.

Thanks,

jwe



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