Nothing wrong with a little manual filtering for the new group members. It is normal and expected. That you have not being doing it for so long is actually amazing. It's not like there is too much traffic to deal with. I personally, absolutely abhor captchas. Please don't do that. Richard H. Clark On Tue, Apr 12, 2022 at 12:26 PM Isaac Beckett wrote:

Thanks Peter! In my experience posts like that, linking to pornographic websites, are not made by humans anyway, but rather by bots. I don’t think this will effect humans too much except at the very beginning.

It may make sense to implement a different captcha, as often the developers of those bots can outsource solving common captcha providers to underpaid humans. Using an uncommon or home-grown captcha solution will make it less likely that bots will be able to get around them using that method. And attacks like these aren’t targeted, usually, so I doubt the bot writers will adapt for one specific mailing list. That will stop bots from signing up in the first place, hopefully.

We could also maybe report abuse of free email services like Gmail or Hotmail or similar in a semi-automated fashion. Would not surprise me if there is some sort of API for that. But on the other hand with the way those companies work it could be a waste of time and effort, since they might not do anything.

And it may also make sense to keep track of which domains non-malicious users are sending email from. That way we can ban entire domains without worrying about getting rid of legitimate users unintentionally.

For example, a small webmail service that we may not realize is a public email service at first, could be used by both a malicious user and a legitimate one. That way we’re only banning domains controlled by spammers exclusively.

There’s lots of resources for this stuff thankfully, you can go on a whole tangent reading about email spam prevention on Wikipedia.

I wish you luck with figuring out how to stop this annoying nonsense. _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list -- devel@sel4.systems To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@sel4.systems