[Chicago] What the heck is it about this list?

[skip at pobox.com]

    Martin> Once again, last evening I posted a harmless, perhaps useful,
    Martin> missive, and once again the stupid list widget disliked
    Martin> something in the headers and has kicked it to the moderators for
    Martin> approval.  Since it doesn't tell me what it disliked, I haven't
    Martin> a clue how to avoid this ridiculous behavior in the future.
    Martin> Anyone know anything, or is this just the sort of crap up with
    Martin> which we must put?  (Why?)

Martin,

This is the nature of the web these days.  Almost all mailing lists get
spammed a lot.  Most lists hosted on mail.python.org have a SpamBayes filter
in front of them.  The couple that don't (the spambayes list itself and
webmaster) have good technical reasons that they can't be filtered.  All
lists to which SpamBayes is applied, including python-list, python-dev and
chicago, use the same training database.  That training database is thus
pretty narrow in its focus.  If you post something with few clues it knows
much about (that is, not mentioning Python-related topics much, if at all),
and a few clues that look spammy (for example, mentioning discounts on
purchases is probably a bell-ringer), it's likely SpamBayes is going to
consider that mail message "unsure".  It can't tell whether or not it's spam
or ham, so it holds it for a moderator to approve.  The system is not
perfect, but it's the best we can do given the amount of volunteer time
available to devote to these sorts of tasks.  That's all this amounts to.  I
help administer many mailing lists on mail.python.org.  They all get the
occasional false positive.

Skip