602184 - Mailing list spam

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(mozilla.org Graveyard :: Server Operations, task)

Description

[Milos Dinic [:Milos]]

Hello,

I've been looking for an answer on how to remove spam from a list I'm admin of for quite some time now, and it seems like no one knows. Is it possible for list admins to remove posts at all?

Milos.

Comment 1

[Filip Miletic]

Just FYI.

Milos, unfortunately the spammers are very persistent and removing the spam messages yourself won't get you very far.  They will always be many steps ahead anything you can reasonably do, even if you were allowed to remove the messages.

The Google Groups interface does have an option to flag messages as spam, but I don't know what happens with that report.  This will only flag messages on Google's news server though, but it may be enough for your purpose.

I'll see what I can do.

Comment 2

[Milos Dinic [:Milos]]

(In reply to comment #1)
> Just FYI.
> 
> Milos, unfortunately the spammers are very persistent and removing the spam
> messages yourself won't get you very far.  They will always be many steps ahead
> anything you can reasonably do, even if you were allowed to remove the
> messages.

May be true, but we will be able to clean it, and not have like dozens of spam post for every regular post we write. I agree it's not a perfect solution, but it's at least something.

> The Google Groups interface does have an option to flag messages as spam, but I
> don't know what happens with that report.  This will only flag messages on
> Google's news server though, but it may be enough for your purpose.
> 

I have reported every single one of them, a few months ago, and nothing happened.

> I'll see what I can do.

Thanks.

Comment 3

[Filip Miletic]

(In reply to comment #2)
> May be true, but we will be able to clean it, and not have like dozens of spam
> post for every regular post we write. I agree it's not a perfect solution, but
> it's at least something.

If you are keen on investing time in this, go ahead.  But be warned before you do, it's a battle that can not be won by manual labor alone.  For every message that you remove, spammers can create 10 new ones, in the same time that it took you remove the one.

> I have reported every single one of them, a few months ago, and nothing
> happened.

Please be patient.

Comment 4

[Milos Dinic [:Milos]]

(In reply to comment #3)
> (In reply to comment #2)
> > May be true, but we will be able to clean it, and not have like dozens of spam
> > post for every regular post we write. I agree it's not a perfect solution, but
> > it's at least something.
> 
> If you are keen on investing time in this, go ahead.  But be warned before you
> do, it's a battle that can not be won by manual labor alone.  For every message
> that you remove, spammers can create 10 new ones, in the same time that it took
> you remove the one.
> 

True, it is possible. However, I will do my best to stop them. Arguing here won't increase my spare time I plan to spend on that. Also, having 10 spam messages is way better then having 50 of them.

Although I'm getting your point, I don't agree on giving up on that.

> > I have reported every single one of them, a few months ago, and nothing
> > happened.
> 
> Please be patient.

I'm doing my best for this community to get more people involved. Having an official mailing list full of spam is something that'll make newcomers think of it as of a list that is not maintained enough, which implies that community members are not taking care of it, which again implies they don't care. That's exactly what I'm trying to prevent.

Comment 5

[Shyam Mani [:fox2mike]]

groups.google.com is not run by Mozilla IT, it's run by Google. 

If there is no action for IT here, I'd like to close this out.

Comment 6

[Milos Dinic [:Milos]]

(In reply to comment #5)
> groups.google.com is not run by Mozilla IT, it's run by Google. 
> 
> If there is no action for IT here, I'd like to close this out.

That's why I opened this bug, to see if IT can do something about it. Isn't there?

Comment 7

[Shyam Mani [:fox2mike]]

(In reply to comment #6)
 
> That's why I opened this bug, to see if IT can do something about it. Isn't
> there?

I'm sorry, but we report it to Google. They don't seem to take action or take a long time to do so. There is nothing much else we can do from end (than what we're already doing, which is reporting it to Google).