We're playing around with greylisting and other spam reduction stuff here, and in the course of that I fatfingered the whitelist a week ago without noticing. So if you're seeing posts with old dates, it's because I just fished them out of the spamtrap.

One of the things we want to get rid of is the silent discarding of spam to mailing lists themselves, for exactly this sort of reason. If we bounce it during acceptance, legitimate users will get an error message (likely telling them to subscribe first), at which point they can email me to tell me I'm an idiot in real time, instead of a week after the fact.

And spammers will get a no-such-recipient, which will occasionally even get the address off the list. (Seldom, though. We still get spam for mailing lists that closed down before the turn of the century, though that might be because their addresses get re-harvested off antique web pages.)

Karen Cravens (Mod) wrote:

We're playing around with greylisting and other spam reduction stuff here, and in the course of that I fatfingered the whitelist a week ago without noticing. So if you're seeing posts with old dates, it's because I just fished them out of the spamtrap.

Worth noting that we're not greylisting anything but personal addresses at this point... no mailing list stuff, and we'll probably never greylist on those.

But for spam control on my own account, greylisting has been incredible... around a 90% reduction in spam.

(Greylisting is where the receiving server temporarily rejects incoming mail and depends on the sending server to resend it later. Spammers don't resend, legitimate mail servers do. It creates a delay the first time someone sends mail to a particular address, but after successful delivery, they get whitelisted automatically.)

On Mon, 31 Mar 2008, Carl D Cravens (Mod) wrote:

Worth noting that we're not greylisting anything but personal addresses at this point... no mailing list stuff, and we'll probably never greylist on those.

Right. The mailing lists themselves (vs. things like their signup addresses, which need to get mail from "strangers") are pretty much black and white - if we don't recognize your address, you don't get to post, period. The only change we're going to there is making sure posts from legit users with new addresses get properly bounced so they know what's happening.

That will be slightly different for web participants, who will be able to use "lazy registration" to sign up while making their first post. Current moderators can attest to the evolution of our comment-spam filtering process, which is steadily improving. (Obligatory gripe: it's still a technological solution to what's at root a social/legal problem.)