Re: [PHP-DEV] Re: Dear Friends & Future Millionaire:

On Tue, 6 Feb 2001, Toby Butzon wrote:

> Although I agree, I don't think it's ever going to happen. Somehow, the
> head PHP folks don't seem to be too interested in combatting spam; I
> brought up the discussion a few weeks ago and was met with strong
> resistance.

    You'd be surprised to learn how many anti-spam measures we
    already have in place.  Those measures effectively dropped
    99.9% of spam in the past; but spammers have adopted new
    methods, so we need to change as well.

    I noticed that the still existing, but inactive php3 list is
    always spammed in a row with active lists.  Assuming that no
    legitimate email is delivered to that list, we can treat all
    emails as spam and hence automatically blacklist further spam
    based on certain criteria.  We can create a separate list
    where a notification about that event is sent to, so that the
    actions are trackable.

    Existing lists would introduce a certain delay between
    receiving an email and forwarding it to list members.  The
    delay would increase the chance that the spam has already
    been delivered to the php3 blacklist, when we perform the
    pre-forwarding check for existing lists.

    So, if we pursue this plan, we should continue advertising
    the php3 list in prominent places where email address
    harvesters will find it (list archives might do a good job at
    that already).

    - Sascha