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 approach has become more common among spammers who specifically target Yahoo Groups. There are even some spammers who tailor their spam just for Freegle groups so that it looks like they are replies to member's posts. Most often these emails try to trick your members into clicking on a link that is related to the item the member requested in a Wanted post.

Because these spam emails don't go through Yahoo Groups, Yahoo isn't able to provide any mechanism to stop them. The FCModSpammers group has created a tool that can be run on your group to reveal which member accounts are being used to harvest your group emails. The spammer finder tool is available here.

The advice above for dealing with spammers who impersonate or hack into members' accounts can also help to identify the spammer member account harvesting addresses. There is also a feature on the plug-in called 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.

The Check Recently Joined Members 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.

Check out also the pages on Grouply and FreebieJeebies

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