Re: Emails from address@hidden

[Bob Proulx]

Hello Thomas!

Thomas Schwinge wrote:
> I've seen (by chance) these held / discarded emails in my list management
> mailbox:
> [...mail from address@hidden

I thought those were pretty strange to be sending to all of the
mailing lists.  It did not seem appropriate to me.  Shouldn't there be
better venues for disseminating that information?

On the other hand in the few cases where I have actually manually seen
those messages in the hold queue I have sent the message on
regardless.  It wasn't spam and it did appear to come from the FSF.

> Has this been sent to all GNU mailing lists?  As it seems, these emails
> have been discarded by the listhelper.

One of the new-ish features of listhelper is a "crossassassin"
feature.  This was inspired by the utility tool originally written by
Santiago Vila for the Debian mailing lists.  Any message that is sent
to more than N mailing lists, where N is currently five, is assumed to
be a blastogram flood spam.  We started out with N being much larger
but slowly reduced it to the present value.

This is counted by actually having seen the message and saved the
md5sum of the message by listhelper more than N times.  It does not
look at the mailing list headers at all for this test.  It simply
stores the md5sum of the message body and counts the number of times
the body md5sum is seen by listhelper.

If that message from campaigns was actually sent to every mailing list
then unless it was subscribed or whitelisted then it would have been
seen by listhelper and would have been automatically discarded by the
crossassassin part of the tool.

Bob

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