[Spam] Policy on Usenet Commercial Postings

[Steve Harris]

Hi all,

[This is a repost, my first attempt doesn't seem to have made it.]

I've recently configured a (suck) text-only server and am trying to gain
an understanding of the daily volume of messages it will have to handle.
With some basic Perl monitoring in place, it's immediately clear that
a high percentage of the total volume is 'Sex Spam' and all originating
from the same source:-
Organization: NewsGuy - Unlimited Usenet $19.95

When I establish some outbound feeds, it won't be a great issue for me
to just drop the alt.sex hierarchy where the majority of this spam is
posted but I'm interested to know the views of other admins as to
whether they consider this spam to be acceptable on Usenet.

Thanks
Steve

[Xavier Roche]

Post by Steve Harris
When I establish some outbound feeds, it won't be a great issue for me
to just drop the alt.sex hierarchy where the majority of this spam is
posted but I'm interested to know the views of other admins as to
whether they consider this spam to be acceptable on Usenet.

Probably not acceptable, but the alt.* hierarchy is not really monitored
for spams, and most commercial news servers won't even read complaints
regarding abuses (commercial news servers == access to warez and porn
through binaries -- who would pay for a awfully unfiltered text service
anyway ?)

Cleanfeed will probably get rid of (most of) them, BTW. NoCeM may catch
some others ..

[Steve Crook]

On Tue, 22 Mar 2011 15:01:52 -0400, Xavier Roche wrote in

Post by Xavier Roche
Cleanfeed will probably get rid of (most of) them, BTW. NoCeM may catch
some others ..

I use Cleanfeed to reject posts to alt.sex (and a couple of other
sub-hierarchies) if the size exceeds a defined limit.

sub local_filter_first {
if ($state{spamsource} and $state{lines} > 20
and $hdr{Newsgroups} =~ /\.sex\.|^alt\.fan\.utb\./) {
logart('cf.sex', 'Sex Post', 271);
return reject('alt.sex');
};
];

As this relies on the individual operator defining the spam-sources, I'm
tempted to take it out of my local config and put it into the mainstream
code.

As a rough guide, it rejects about 200MB in 13k posts each day. By far
the greediest filter I apply in Cleanfeed.