It is not silly at all :) in fact it does a lot of good and helps train filters. The thing we want to achieve here is to get all lists to a point where spam is under control so we know spam that comes into the system past the filters and local rules, then get categorised as such. Lists with thousands of spam emails means legitimate contributions are losing out or thousands or spam emails are not going into to be trained.<div><br></div><div>To all that do moderate emails and so on, great. Keep it up, it really does help and is not 5 minutes of your day wasted!</div><div><br></div><div>John<br><br>On Saturday, 29 August 2015, R. Acconish &lt;<a href="mailto:racconish@gmail.com">racconish@gmail.com</a>&gt; wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div><div><div>Thanks John,<br></div>I had actually been deleting all the spam, but started to wonder if it was not silly :)<br></div>Cheers,<br></div>Racconish<br></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">2015-08-29 17:50 GMT+02:00 John Lewis <span dir="ltr">&lt;<a href="javascript:_e(%7B%7D,&#39;cvml&#39;,&#39;johnflewis93@gmail.com&#39;);" target="_blank">johnflewis93@gmail.com</a>&gt;</span>:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">The best thing to do is to manage moderation queues, deleting spam and approving emails as they come. Leaving spam does nothing but gives false statistics for us to read into. As we will eventually be looking at lists and moderation queues and if lists repeatedly have large queues, we will either assume their inactive, spam targets or need new moderators.<div><br></div><div>Leaving emails in moderation is extremely bad practise as it increases work to find legitimate emails, decreases the chance that they will be sent to the list in an appropriate time and add delay to server side operations as the directories increase in size.</div><div><br></div><div>In my opinion, moderators who leave emails in the queue because it&#39;s spam, aren&#39;t doing a just or a service to anyone and I would encourage them to either give up their responsibilities or have list admins be more active over the matter and remove them. It&#39;s the same as on wikis, if you see spam or vandalism - do you leave it or do you remove it? Lists are no different except you have to be trusted to have the ability to prevent and remove them.</div><div><br></div><div>Also spam filters do learn from your actions! If you discard mail from a domain or emails of a similar pattern, the filter will then learn from it and rank emails higher. While if we delete it server side, the filters are no trained and it means more spam will be allowed to the moderators (though it depends if filters exist to prevent high scoring spam are implemented in the right place!).</div><div><br></div><div>John Lewis<br><br>On Saturday, 29 August 2015, R. Acconish &lt;<a href="javascript:_e(%7B%7D,&#39;cvml&#39;,&#39;racconish@gmail.com&#39;);" target="_blank">racconish@gmail.com</a>&gt; wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div><div><div>Thanks for the reply.<br></div>Can someone please confirm the best is to do nothing, i.e. to just wait for the spam to be deleted on the server?<br></div>Cheers,<br></div>Racconish<br></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">2015-08-28 7:22 GMT+02:00 Asaf Bartov <span dir="ltr">&lt;<a>abartov@wikimedia.org</a>&gt;</span>:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div>Yes: Several lists have been receiving mass subscription requests, from hyphenated random e-mail addresses.<br><br></div>   A.<br><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Aug 27, 2015 at 11:13 AM, R. Acconish <span dir="ltr">&lt;<a>racconish@gmail.com</a>&gt;</span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div><div>Don&#39;t know if this is related but car-fr-l has been receiving an abnormal amount of subscription requests for the last 3 days.<br></div>Cheers,<br></div>Racconish<br><div><div><a></a></div></div></div><div><div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">2015-08-25 17:58 GMT+02:00 Doug Weller <span dir="ltr">&lt;<a>dougwellerarbcom@gmail.com</a>&gt;</span>:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr">This is scary, as it suggests that there must be some genuine emails not getting through. If there are particular lists where the numbers are much higher than others than perhaps we should be told.<div>Doug Weller</div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Aug 24, 2015 at 9:33 PM, Daniel Zahn <span dir="ltr">&lt;<a>dzahn@wikimedia.org</a>&gt;</span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">Hello list admins,<br>
<br>
we have found that globally we had over half a million<br>
mails in mailman lists that were not moderated.<br>
<br>
So that means they got held in the moderation queues but were not<br>
accepted or discarded.<br>
<br>
We have started deleting the oldest ones first (over 1 year old) then<br>
moved to (older than 6 months).<br>
<br>
We are planning to setup an automated cron job to do this<br>
automatically in the background.<br>
<br>
Currently the plan is to delete all messages that are held and older<br>
than 90 days.<br>
<br>
Please let us know if any concerns and moderate a bit more if this<br>
affects your list.<br>
<br>
Thank you and best regards,<br>
<br>
Daniel<span><font color="#888888"><br>
<span><font color="#888888">--<br>
Daniel Zahn &lt;<a>dzahn@wikimedia.org</a>&gt;<br>
Operations Engineer<br>
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