Spam in the Debian List Archive

Comments and suggestions are very welcome.

Status quo

It has been claimed that the Debian list archives contain spam email messages.

There is a "report as spam" button in on the list archive page of each message. The submissions seem to help (more or less) with finding spam but need manual review before they could be acted upon.

Towards a spam removal policy

Policy corner stones

Ad hoc policy

Review standards should be set after seeing how things pan out.

For the start we accept three undisputed reviewers-ratings. If one reviewer has a different rating, there has to be a stronger majority. As formula:

same applies for Ham and Inappropriate.

I hope this would minimize the risk of unwarranted removal. A rigorous standard seems to be necessary to obtain consensus with the project. As such, the three reviewers is only a guideline, not a rule. Of course, more reviewers doing shorter reviews would help tremendously. Ultimately, guaranteeing the integrety of the list archives currently falls in the realm of the Debian listmaster. If the numbers above don't work out, the levels can be changed easily without a hassle, previous blocked content will become available again.

Practical matters

discontinued script based effort to flag spam.

Description: ?ListMaster/ListArchiveSpam/newspamclassify.py

If you have used this one to flag spam, then your work isn't lost. Please send it in, your reports can be converted into the new internal format, so the new method knows which posts have been rated by you.

new web-based effort to flag spam.

Any suggestions on the above and/or the program are of course welcome.

Methods to Nominate Spam for the Review-Process

  1. Press the 'Report as Spam'-Button in the Archive.
  2. Use https://lists.debian.org/cgi-bin/nominate-for-review.pl to report Spam. (You might want to call it like this from your MUA: http://lists.debian.org/cgi-bin/nominate-for-review.pl?Quiet=on&msgid=<MSGID>) see /MUAPlugins for Plugins.

  3. Bounce (as in mutt) the Spam-Message to report-listspam@lists.debian.org

Suggested Improvements and Todos

People doing this

Your help is appreciated.

Debian Developers need a working @debian.org-address and can start here: http://lists.debian.org/archive-spam-removals/review/.

non-Debian Developers can help us by pressing the 'Report as Spam'-Button at the archive.

Some coordinated efforts for specific lists are currently being run:


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