[Spambayes] spam forwarded through the list

[Tim Peters]

[Simone Piunno]
>> maybe you didn't note it because you're running spambayes on
>> your PC, but in the last week several spam messages have been
>> forwarded through the list. This is not a good presentation for
>> spambayes ;)

To the contrary, those of us running spambayes aren't bothered by these even
though the list passes them on <wink>.

>> Maybe the filters on python.org should be sharpened. I'm running
>> Mailman+spambayes integration since last April, and I'm very happy
>> with it.

You should write up what you did on the spambayes wiki!  I bet many would be
interested in the details.

[Tony Meyer]
> I'm pretty sure that this list also does that (although I don't know
> if there's any ongoing training).
> ...

Yes, all the mailing lists on python.org go thru some form of spambayes.
It's certainly proof that spam changes!  The fellow who set all this up
burned out on it, and no new training has been done for months.  More spam
is coming thru on all python.org mailing lists as a result.

The most common reaction so far seems to be to switch lists so that only
members can post to them, with other msgs held for moderator review.  We
could do that here too, but not unless someone else volunteers to take over
moderation (I'm the moderator now, which isn't much of a time sink because
about the only msgs held for review now are large ones).

> One of the biggest problems with filtering this list is that people
> can quite validly post entire spam messages ("why did this score
> 0.1?" type things).  IIRC, one false-positive that Tim never managed
> to eliminate in his testing was a message with a single line and then
> a quoted spam.

Yup.  When python.org lists were filtered by SpamAssassin, SA was
effectively disabled for this list, because it rejected too much legitimate
traffic.