Attending Board Members: slynne, mary, gelinas, dpc, polygon Non-Attending Board Members: vanloons, bhoward Attending Non-Board Members: aruba, non-Grexer Carol Moore, keesan, jdeigert The July 5, 2005 meeting of the Grex Board of Directors was called to order at 8:05 p.m. by President Slynne at Zingerman's Next Door. Treasurer's Report: Assistant Treasurer aruba reported that the expenses for June were about $150 and income was over $400. We received a property tax bill from the city of Ann Arbor as of December 31,2004. There are 66 members, with 55 paid up. The financial situation is pretty stable. Staff Report: Newuser is down on the Web; it is up on telnet. Polygon moved that we ratify the decision to add mcnally to the root staff. Dpc seconded, and the motion was carried unanimously. Jdeigert suggested a note in the Web message of the day suggesting that new users telnet in. Gelinas suggested reviving the Grim File Reaper, since it has been 3 months. The spam filter is still on the staff list of things to do; it is next on the list. Gelinas said it will take 2 or 3 more mcnallys. Other staff have limited time or are not active. He noted that, according to Rhett Butler, "Love has its limits." Slynne asked about giving volunteers non-root access. Gelinas said we would still have to vet their work. Aruba and slynne had their arms twisted to do some small tasks on a spam filter. Polygon said he was on the edge of despair about the spam problem at the University of Michigan. However, at the County, where he works, he has had only 4 spans to his account in 6 months. Dpc asked if polygon would check with the County to see what they use, and we might buy it. Polygon said he would check. Keesan said procmail works for her. Polygon said the volume of viruses is down. Aruba said we should have someone read about the various packages and post the evaluation in Cop. Aruba said he would do something about this in July. Keesan said she was getting large e-mails from newusers and wondered if a size limit of 100k could be wet, with notice to the senders of bounces. Gelinas said maybe something could be done. Polygon wanted to know what had happened to mdw's spam filters. Aruba and gelinas said that they had not been ported over. Aruba said we have an offer of a donation to buy a PC Weasel if we want. Gelinas felt it would not be as useful as has been claimed. Mary said it might be good if there was no extra cost. But it needs an extra phone line, which would be a down side. Keesan reported modem problems on the dialins. Gelinas will check this out. Mary asked if the dialin users could exist on one line. Keesan said the first line is busy about once a week. Mary thought the second line might b used for the PC Weasel. Dpc reported frequent garble on the first line. Polygon said he tends to favor he PC Weasel to maximize the use of staff time. Old Business: The issue of an open or closed newuser was postponed until newuser is available again. Schedule Next Meeting: The next meeting will be on Wednesday, September 14, at 7:30 p.m., at Zingerman's Next Door. New Business: The Board discussed the absence of bhoward and vanloons. Slynne will contact them about their attendance. Keesan asked what happens to e-mail on the System if someone dies. Dpc suggested that this should be handled in a will. The Board recognized that we do not have access to users' passwords in any event. The Board decided not to pursue this matter further because of privacy concerns. We will handle future matters of this nature on a case by case basis. The meeting was adjourned at 9:00 p.m.19 responses total.
The modems and/or phone lines don't seem to be working at all any more. Today I got a talk request from a grex user who had compiled spamassassin for himself at grex and said we were all welcome to use it (~avalyn1/bin/spamassassin) and he sent me emailed instructions on how to set up .procmailrc to use spamassassin. He will try to figure out how to start an item on this in agora. I have a filter in .procmailrc to deal with large emails already and would add spamassassin after this and after a whitelist.
Did he try looking in /usr/local/bin first? > Ok: !which spamassassin > /usr/local/bin/spamassassin
He says he recompiles the latest version every 2 months - does grex? Could you explain (maybe in agora) how to set up and use spamassassin? Or put the instructions somewhere and point to them in motd? The three new files in .spamassassin add to 360K already without me having added anything to them. This could take up a lot of space if everyone had a separate filter.
THanks for the (as always) copious minutes, Dave. One correction: Carol spells her last name "Mohr".
re #3: You can expect those files to continue growing, substantially, unless you turn off the "Bayesian filtering" features of spamassassin (which, unfortunately, will substantially reduce its effectiveness.) The biggest single space hog in the .spamassassin directory is a tokens database that the bayesian filters use to do a probabilistic analysis of the likelihood of a given message being spam.
Today it caught 9 real spams and let through several real mails, with no mistakes. I don't even know how to use the Bayesian filtering - how do I tell if it is on? I presume a system-wide filter would use a lot less space than a separate one for each user, to which users could add whitelists in .procmailrc.
My .spamassassin directory was 360K yesterday and is 390K today with a tokens directory and an autowhitelist directory. Can I set it not to do an autowhitelist? I have my own whitelist in .procmailrc preceding the line about spamassassin. Anything else I can do to keep it from growing? I don't mind a few false negatives if it keeps me from overrunning my space limit.
I am running without the autowhitelist option (no -a) so the autowhitelist file at least will not grow larger. I don't have any options enabled except what is default.
EXCUSE ME TO_DAY WE SHOULD DISCUUSS NHARMON (NHATHIN HARMIN) IS GAY DICSUCS
YEAH< I HEARD HE"S GAY
I am *not* in favor of setting an incoming mail size limit of 100K. If it comes to setting *any* limit, how do we arbitrate the size selected?
I suggest putting the choice in newuser, after explaining that there is a limited-size mailbox. Maybe offering size limits of infinite, 100K, 50K.
auto-whitelist growth is negligible. it's the word lists for the bayesian classification which grow, quickly, and with no real upper- bound.
How does this growth occur? Can I stop it? I am satisfied with the way spamassassin is doing things now, and if it misses something, I can add my own little filter in .procmailrc. I just put back all the To: filters (makji, webmaster - any mail sent to them is spam).
Re #13:
I'm wondering if Paul Graham (proponent of Bayesian filtering) has dealt
with this problem.
I am now up to about 600K in the .spamassassin directory. Can I periodically just delete all the files in there so they don't take up all my space? Only the 'tok' file is expanding - can I at least delete the other three (one is autowhitelist).
Almost every word in every message is recorded in the wordlist, along with how often it has been seen per message and overall, and some other minor stats. This is how Bayesian classification works. If you trim or empty it periodically SpamAssassin will have to start over, and that generally means some spam will get through.
I don't mind a bit of spam getting through if it keeps me from using up all the space allotted me. I have added my own filters anyway, and changed from five to three asterisks when a lot of 3.4's got through, all spam. I keep a log and can catch false positives that way.
TROGG IS DAVID BLAINE
You have several choices: