Wes et al,
>
> Maintaining a set of spam filters would be nice, and I'd be inclined to
> vote that way
> to keep the list "open"  BUT  I'd be hesitant to impose that kind of extra
> workload on
> the list administrator.
>
> --
> Wes Groleau
> http://AFATDS/~wwgrol
> http://freepages.rootsweb.com/~wgroleau/Wes
>
One approach is to moderate the list. This would obviously put some
burden on the list admin, but might actually be easier for him than
trying to fine-tune a spam filter system.

Personally, I don't find it burdensome just to delete spam. Yeah,
it's some extra keystrokes every day, but not beyond my patience
yet.

I turned off much of the filtering they do here at GW, because
it was over-filtering. For example, any message that comes from
an open relay is assumed to be spam and is diverted into a user's
spam folder. Unfortunately, I missed a good deal of important
mail, just because the sender's site sent it through a relay.

So rather than having to remember to read my spam folder regularly,
I decided it was easier just to let the spam flow into my normal
in-box, and use my delete key a few times a day.

This is a tough problem for everyone here. IMHO,

- We don't want the spam
- We don't want to close the list to non-subscribers - till now
  we've always wanted the list to be as accessible as possible,
  to let us be as evangelical as we wanted to be
- We don't want to make the admin spend all his time tweaking
  the filtering system - no matter how hard he tries, it'll
  never be perfect anyway

It seems to me the best approach is to moderate it. If it doesn't
put an unacceptable burden on Mike Berman, he can just release
the non-spam messages with the press of a key. It doesn't matter
if the release is delayed a bit, as there's very little truly
urgent traffic here.

If moderating is unacceptable to Mike, I'd vote for just leaving
it as it is, and readers will just delete the spam without comment.
That works for me; maybe it'll work for the rest of us.

Mike Feldman