What is with all the SPAM in comp.arch.embedded?

It has, many times...

Probably not.

It seems that the spam is only a problem on certain news servers. I, for example, very rarely see spam at any significant volume, while other report a flood. It seems that my ISP remove the spam before I ever see it.

Search through the list for more info.

Many of us have installed local NNTP servers, to which we connect using the local loopback IP address. The benefit of the local server is that it has access to, and can filter on, *all* header fields and (if required) the complete body text. With that in place, it's very simple to throw out the spam before it gets loaded into your client news reader.

Most of the spam seems, lately, to be injected via GoogleGroups so I have a rule-set established to drop anything with googlegroups.com in the Message-ID field except for specified "whitelisted" users.

On this morning's pull, the server got 246 new postings. Of those, 144 were dropped.

The local server takes a little bit of time to setup but it's worth it to avoid having to wade through the spam; think of it as NRE. I've been using Hamster

"NewsProxy")

If you have to whitelist posters from google groups, how do you see posts from people who don't post a lot? Will you see my posts?

Yup. I started with names that I recognized and added to that list by seeing holes in threads and by filtering the killed log with a Perl script that reports total posts versus posting ID. It's not too hard to pick out the real posters against the noise of accounts like "Monty ," which appears to be one of the newer spam accounts.

Google has been allowing spammers free rein to bombard Usenet for some time. I filter out all postings from google groups, and now I very rarely see spam.

Yes, I am about to give up using Google groups except for a couple moderated ones. (Do you hear this Google?)

Ed

Agreed.

The only thing I find Google Groups useful for is searching through archived posts.

Frankly if someone can't be bothered to use a usenet NNTP server, then that's there problem. Everyone seems to think that t'Internet is all port

So do I.

Yes, this is what is good with Google; sometimes to lookup very old posts, once I dug up a message ca 1988. Is out there another archive machine that can be used alternatively? If not, then searching an archive contaminated with all sorts of waste isn't worth the time. Which means that in a few (or may be more) years many technical usenet groups would have been dead barrents.

Andrew

... snip ...

You don't need all that, but you do need to get away from the poor google interface to usenet. Get a decent reader, such as Thunderbird. Then spend some time (it may be weeks) setting up your spam filters. Everytime spam appears, pick something consistent about it and use it to select and delete (or mark as read, which is normally better). These days most of my newsgroups filter out about one-half of the input.

But getting rid of google is essential. This means the newsreader, not posters. I don't eliminate google posters.

I am thinking the same thing. I can't believe that Google is going to let a small number of spammers destroy their product. Google groups is quickly becoming useless and unless the direction changes soon, I will just abandon it.

There is some irony in this. I spent a lot of time setting up email spam filters in Eudora. In the end the spammers were winning and there was little I could do about it. But then I discovered Gmail. I could route my email to gmail, then route it back through my email server to my pop account where I could read it. I had also tried this with my IEEE account, but their spam filters did not seem to do a good job. Gmail, on the other hand, does an excellent job of stopping the spam. It has gone from literally hundreds of spam emails a day to just a small handful a week.

So what the heck is going on with Google groups??? Why can't they figure out a way to apply their spam filter technology to these groups???

It is not worth the effort for me to go through that process of setting up a newsreader and all the filters I would need. I don't want to get into that anti-spam battle. If Google can't (or won't) find a way to stop the spammers, then I will just give up and say Google and the spammers have won.

I filter Google posters too. Cuts down tremendously on SPAM.

Here is the best part of my filters:

%BOS [*] Score:: =-9999 Message-ID: teranews Message-ID: dizum Message-ID: virginmedia Message-ID: googlegroups Message-ID: webtv Message-ID: albasani Message-ID: gallopinginsanity Message-ID: orange Message-ID: easynews Message-ID: moria Message-ID: 4ax Message-ID: phx Message-ID: schestowitz Message-ID: newsguy Message-ID: bluewin Message-ID: privat Message-ID: motzarella Message-ID: ziggynet1 %EOS

The unfortunate thing about filtering on things besides the subjec line is that it slows things down by a factor of 50-100 when you enter a group -- instead of a single XOVER command that returns the subjects for everything in one go, the reader has to send a HEADER command for every article.

Still, it's worth it. Some groups I read are now 60-70% Google spam.

Give him a break, he's using the money he makes spamming to support his eight kids. Not easy to do when tithing 20% to the Falun Gong.

Although I don't agree with the methods he is using to sabotage the Olympics, his goal of freeing Tibet at least shows that his heart is in the right place.