Spammers

Spam is the Internet equivalent of junk mail - email you didn't ask for, and probably don't want. It's sent by spammers, usually using automated tools (aka: spam bots). Freegle members will often have their own spam filters to detect and remove spam. The following just covers what you can do as a moderator to reduce the chance of your Freegle group being used for spam.

Spammers attack Freegle either by sending spam to the group, or by collecting members email addresses from the posts they have made to the groups and using them to send spam.

Sending spam to the group.

There are three ways this can be done:

1. Spammer joins the group and sends spam.

You can combat this by:

• Moderating new members until they have posted a valid OFFER. Many spammers join a group and immediately send a message - if you moderate new members then the spam will show up in your Pending queue. Don't reply to it, just delete it - replying to spam just tells the spammer that they've reached a human, which is what they're trying to do. Most spammers either aren't clued-up enough to send a valid OFFER to get off moderation before sending their spam.

• Requiring applications for membership to be approved. This means more work for you, but again, spammers generally aren't astute enough to provide a valid reason for joining. (link to 'pre-approving members' pros and cons here -not that i've written it yet or anything!) "This is labour intensive, but it's easy to make it happen automatically."

• Keeping an eye on the FCModSpammers group - report spammers to it, and actively remove reported spammers from your list. FCMODSpammers@yahoogroups.com Checking this manually is quite labour intensive, but it's easy to make happen automatically. Here is the relevant entry in the plug-in wiki: http://wiki.modplugin.org/index.php/Spammer_List

2. Spammer impersonates ("spoofs") an existing member, and sends spam which appears to come from that member.

There's basically nothing you can do about this - it's quite easy to forge email and make it appear to come from a valid user (it doesn't require their Yahoo password). So if you see an existing user send spam, don't assume that they've done this personally -it may be that someone is impersonating them. Look at the members posting history to verify this, often very active members and even moderators are targeted by this kind of spammer. Place the user on moderation for a while, to allow you to catch any other such messages, and contact them gently to check.

3. Spammer hacks into a members email account and sends spam to the group. In this instance you will see when the email arrives in your inbox that their whole address book has been cc-ed. Again, put the member on moderation. You could contact them and let them know gently that their email account may have been hacked, there is an 'automated vacation reply' being sent out that they should switch off and they may wish to consider changing their password and running a full security scan on their computer.

Harvesting member addresses and using them to send spam.

A spammer joins the group, and then extracts email addresses from the message archive, or from emails that get sent to the group. They can then send spam directly to those addresses, without passing through your group. This requires quite a persistent spammer, so it's rare, but because it doesn't go via the group there's little you can do about it. The advice above for dealing with spammers who impersonate or hack into member’s accounts can help identify the culprits who might be doing this. There is also a feature on the plug-in called the Membership crosscheck, <---hyperlink here: http://wiki.modplugin.org/index.php/Membership_Crosscheck With this feature you can check your membership list against that of a group that is nowhere near your own. Someone who is a member of multiple groups that are not close together might well be a spammer.

Check recently joined members<---hyperink here: http://wiki.modplugin.org/index.php/Check_Recently_Joined_Members This feature allows you to identify people who've probably joined multiple groups at once, and who therefore need extra investigation to show that they're not spammers.