Bubulle's weblog

Debian mailing lists' standard policy is to allow posts from unsubscribed users. That of course fits our standards for opened development but has the drawback of allowing a lot of spam to reach our mailing lists.

This spam also clutters the mailing lists archives.

Since 2009, a working system allows removing spam from the mailing list archives.

Today, I would like to put some light on the results of this system :

• Over one million nominations for spams (a "nomination" means that someone reporting that a said post is likely to be a spam mail)
• Nearly fourty thousand individual messages considered for review
• Nearly ALL of these processed by Sandro Tosi, leader of the tireless reviewers team. Let's bend at Sandro.
• Out of these, over thirty-three thousand messages classified as spam and removed from the archives

Results are impressive for mailing lists where a coordinated effort is done over time: the debian-boot mailing list (first coorindated effort, initiated by regretted Frans Pop), the Italian and French mailing lists.

You want to help? You can.

Reporting spam is as easy as reading Debian mailing lists. When you see a mail that you consider being a spam mail, just bounce it to report-listspam at lists dot debian dotte org. Don't forward it, you need to bounce it ("b" keyboard shortcut in mutt). Alternatively, you can check for this message on Debian mailing lists archives and hit the "Report as spam" button.

If you're a Debian developer, you can help in reviewing nominated spam. It takes me about 20 minutes every week. Go to the spam review home page and register for an account there. Then, you'll be able to process through nominated posts. Once a given post is confirmed as spam by at least 3 reviewers with nobody else reporting it as "ham", it is removed the next week from the archive.

Feel free to join the game and be part of the Debian moppers team!

Do I need to explain what is the Cheese and Wine (C&W) party? Still, if some of you need more information, please feel free to ask.

The C&W7 wiki page now exists on DebConf wiki.

Information will come there until the day of the C&W, which is scheduled for Tuesday July 26th, so the day before the planned daytrip, if I'm correct.

C&W orga details are currently very vague, but the most important point is: start planning what YOU will be bringing for the event.

Remember that the event is only successful when many of us manage to bring good stuff to share (preferrably cheese, wine...or other ethanol-improved beverages). If you think about something *else* than cheese, please feel free to bring it: just try to have it representative of your part of the world...or a part of the world you love.

Any further questions can be asked in the debconf-discuss mailing list or in #debconf channel on irc.debian.org