Re: Email viruses

[Danilo Segan <danilo gnome org>]

Today at 17:07, Telsa Gwynne wrote:

> So yes, if you know about that alias, it is effectively
> open to anyone to post to. 

As it turns out, no.  Read below.

> However, to make things worse, lots of the virus-laden emails 
> purport to come from people who are indeed subscribed to the 
> mailing list. But they're not. The headers are forged. 

Ok, I've tested this and the problem here is *only* forging of "from"
fields.  Alias is simply an alias which doesn't avoid moderation queue
(I've just sent a message from unsubscribed address, and got notified
that it got stuck in moderation queue; moderators, please disregard
it, and sorry for wasting your time :).

So, the only problem with docs gnome org alias is that it is
probably more exposed than the real list address.  Forged addresses
cannot be coped with easily, unless we start doing something like
requiring all messages to be signed or something.  And we're
definitely not going to go that route.

So, I don't see a reason to dump this alias, since it's not really
the problem.  Problems are forged mail headers which are used by
spammers.

I know of two currently popular methods for handling this: virus/spam
detectors on the server side, or on the client side.  I believe they
do fairly good when set properly, but it would require more effort
from already pre-occupied Gnome sysadmin team.

Cheers,
Danilo