administrivia: banning subject headings

[Richard Welty <rwelty@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

with respect to banning subject headings. the banned headings are flexible;
bounced postings go in my inbox for examination, and i can forward messages
to the digest as appropriate.

i banned virus because of a virus warning posting that got bounced for
other reasons. i realize that people who send out virus warnings are well
meaning, but they really have no place on the list.

the "other reasons" is of interest too: header lines of over 1024
characters in length typically trigger rejection. they are bad news for a
number of reasons; 95% or more of the time, they're not associated with
legitmate email. if you send a message to: a lot of people or cc: it to a
lot of people, and add the digest address on, odds are it won't make the
digest.

i also have put a ban on from and subject lines that refer to MLM (aka,
multi-level-marketing), one of the more obnoxious and prevailing types of
spam on the net. i will be looking for others; this morning i put out bans
on these four common spam subject lines:

/^subject:.*What "THEY" Don't Want/i
/^subject:.*Email .* Million People/i
/^subject:.*Are They Investigating You/i
/^subject:.*Are You Being Investigated/i

this was a very bad weekend for spam. given that the digest moved, i was
expecting a lot of email, but the spam wave didn't help much. i got over
800 messages in this morning's inbox, which i'm still trudging through. i'm
about 1/2 way there...

richard

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