Gnats and spam

Gnats and spam

[Neil Booth]

gcc-gnats@ appears to have landed itself on some spam lists.

Could we not open a *new* PR for any mail sent to gnats, and just
drop the mail if it doesn't have the correct form of subject line?
We're getting slews of "pending" PRs that just contain spam mail,
and closing them sends off a mail to the spam address that only
confirms we're good for more spam.

Neil.

Re: Gnats and spam

[Tom Tromey]

>>>>> "Neil" == Neil Booth <neil@daikokuya.demon.co.uk> writes:

Neil> We're getting slews of "pending" PRs that just contain spam mail,
Neil> and closing them sends off a mail to the spam address that only
Neil> confirms we're good for more spam.

I wrote a little script that deletes a PR without sending email.
I use it to clean out the spam from the automake gnats repository.
Obviously it must be used with extreme care.  I can send it to you if
you want it.

Deleting spam without sending mail would be a useful feature for gnats.

Tom

Re: Gnats and spam

[Joseph S. Myers]

On 26 Apr 2002, Tom Tromey wrote:

> I wrote a little script that deletes a PR without sending email.
> I use it to clean out the spam from the automake gnats repository.
> Obviously it must be used with extreme care.  I can send it to you if
> you want it.

Does this create a permanent log entry (and notify gcc-bugs)?  If not,
it's bound to cause problems for someone in future trying to work out why
a PR is missing, when it went missing and what backups are needed to
recover it.

Does the gcc-gnats address get all the spam filtering applied to it that
is applied to the mailing lists?

I suggest a "don't mail originator, just the lists" checkbox in gnatsweb.  
Though the real problem is that unhandled mail gets filed in PRs in the
first place (spam should be dropped, genuine contributions to PRs with the
subject line in the wrong format should be filed by a moderator, but
without a new PR number getting allocated).

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
jsm28@cam.ac.uk

Re: Gnats and spam

[Tom Tromey]

>>>>> "Joseph" == Joseph S Myers <jsm28@cam.ac.uk> writes:

Tom> I wrote a little script that deletes a PR without sending email.
Tom> I use it to clean out the spam from the automake gnats repository.
Tom> Obviously it must be used with extreme care.  I can send it to you if
Tom> you want it.

Joseph> Does this create a permanent log entry (and notify gcc-bugs)?

Nope.

Tom

Re: Gnats and spam

[Robert Dewar]

In the GNAt world we have eliminated 99.9% of spam from our support
lists by the simple mechanism of requiring the string GNAT to appear
in the subject line. If it does not we send a polite message back 
explaining that people must resubmit with this string in the subject.