First month on my own

Yeah, it’s already been a month since I took off and started working for Haxx full time. Starting a company (even though the company already existed in the legal sense) certainly involves a lot of paperwork and talking to banks, insurance companies and getting arrangements with partners etc. A lot of that of course being just an initial phase, but some of it will be a more integrated part of my day now when I don’t have a well-oiled team of admins hired that deal with such matters.

I’m happy to say that I have had a whole slew of good talks with existing and potentially new customers, and I’m already cooperating with a few companies in very constructive ways – so that I can help others succeed with their undertakings. Several things that happened during this month involved open source (although I’m not able to talk about them in public), and I feel really good when my work and my beliefs can go hand in hand!

This said, I’m always ready for more and new missions. If you’re in need, you know where I am!

Spammers now subscribe

During several years I’ve been setting mailing lists I admin to only accept posts from subscribers iA can with spamn order to avoid having to deal with very large amounts of spam posts.

While that is slightly awkward to users of the list, the huge benefit for me as admin has been the deciding factor.

Recently however, I’ve noticed how this way to prevent spam on the mailing lists have started to fail more and more frequently.

Now, I see a rapid growth in spam from users who actually subscribe first and then post their spam to the list. Of course, sometimes spammers happen to just fake the from address from a member of a list – like when a spammer fakes my address and sends spam to a list I am subscribed to, but it’s quite obvious that we also see the actual original spammer join lists and send spam as well.

It makes me sad, since I figure the next step I then need to take on the mailing lists I admin is to either spam check the incoming mails with a tool like spamassassin (and risk false positives or to not trap all spams) and/or start setting new members as moderated so that I have to acknowledge their first post to the list in order to make sure they’re not spammers.

Or is there any other good idea of what I can do that I haven’t thought of?