As strong as the weakest link
It seems I’m really unlucky when dealing with the Python-List.
As pointed before, when I signed it, I got in the middle of a battle between Lispers and Pythonistas. Although it was pretty ugly, a lot of good stuff appeared there; after all in the middle of it, some people pointed good points in both languages. And, as the list goes, it is a programming language list.
Then, when things settle down, someone decided that it would be good to post things about 9/11. Yeah, things from 2001 (some people seem to be trapped in the past and really like it). Several people complained and, for weeks, the posts keep appearing over and over again (each time, a different story, but always about 9/11). After three weeks, it seemed that the moderators decided to do nothing, so I did what I would did: I reported it back to SpamCop.
What I hoped was that the original poster would get listed, his/her ISP notified and, if everything fails, at least wake up the Python-List moderators.
The thing is, after some reports, my subscription turned into digest and I received one message from one of the moderators. It seems that, instead of getting the ISP from the spammer notified, I manage to get the hoster of Python-List notified and blacklisted. I explained my point of view, that I was reporting spam on the list and not the list itself and so on.
Then, the guy came with this:
Those messages were coming in through the USENET gateway.
The moderators have no control over the gateway.
We do have very aggressive anti-spam processes on the python.org mail servers — I’ve written a six-part article to be published on the LOPSA.org website on the current state of the art on fighting spam for mail server administrators, and I use what we’re doing on python.org as one of the key sets of examples that I keep coming back to.
That’s when I unsubscribe the list. Not only because it pretty hard to follow conversations in digest mode, but because such stupid nonsensical message. In one point, say that they are very agressive towards spam and, on another point, show that there is a way to bypass every “state of the art” measures they have against spam. It is like, “I have build this super-strong wall; nothing can breach it, you can drop a nuclear bomb on it and it won’t even scratch! But people say it is too dark inside, so I put this glass window”.
Really. How can someone say “we are very rigid against spam” and let an uncontrolled, unprotected way to send things directly to the list? That’s utterly stupid and braindead. The guy probably never heard that “a chain is as strong as its weakest link”. It doesn’t matter if they are using an advanced neural network, a bayesian filter or even a positronic brain to filter the messages if there is way to bypass everything.
Stupid. Some people should look around before praising their own work.
