Newsgroups and mailing lists (was Re: Slightly OT: Why all thespam?)

[Terry Reedy]

"Steve Holden" <steve at holdenweb.com> wrote in message 
news:f36kc1$hq3$2 at sea.gmane.org...
| I *did* try to explain all this a week or two ago.  Did I not make myself 
clear?

I could ask the same.  Quoting from that post:

| All I am saying is that it's difficult to catch *everything* when so
| much of the content comes in via Usenet. These posts never touch any
| python.org infrastructure before being incorporated into the newsgroup
| content on servers all over the world.

I am completely aware of that.  But *I* am talking about posts which I 
believe *do* touch python.org on the way to gmane.  And please note that I 
asked for (but have not gotten a response to) verification of that belief 
before complaining .

| Looking at the headers in one of the messages you were writing about it
| appears they are being posted from Google groups, so maybe you could
| complain to them. Good luck with that ;-).

I think most everything I have looked at recently came from Google groups 
or Google mail.  Perhaps they considered themselved immune from the usenet 
death penalty of being cutoff from the rest of usenet for not controlling 
their own spammers.  Or, I suppose, perhaps their current resources are 
overwhelmed.  In either case, being from Google should be a point toward 
spamishness.

| The Python list managers know what they are doing,

Things were fine on the gmane side until a few months ago.  Then what they 
knew started to slip, it seems.

| and they *do* keep a  huge amount of spam off the list.

I have previously thanked them publicly.

| The occasional piece gets through

For the past several months, it has been several a day, not 'the occasional 
piece ... from time to time'.  Much was repeated (>1/day) leftist political 
postings from the same sources WITH SUBJECT LINES IN CAPS, MAKING THEM VERY 
NOTICEABLE to even the most cursory scan, whether by person or program. 
*If* it was indeed coming thru py.org, they I would have expected it to 
have been stopped (or stopped sooner).

This discussion group, with its three versions, is one of the public faces 
of Python.  A dirty, junky group is bad public relations for Python.  When 
the current spam wave started, nobody said much for a couple of months at 
least.  I, and perhaps others, expected the 'we know what we are doing' 
system to respond.  These 'why spam' threads only started when it did not 
seem to.  They constitute fair and valid public feedback.

I notice today that there is no spam in 80 messages.  A good sign I hope.

Terry Jan Reedy