Dear R-help users, In the last couple of days there has been a greatly increased attempt to sneak spam through to the R-help mailing list. A few of these spam messages have made it into the list, but the majority have been discarded by the moderators. The spam messages have been posted to the list via the Nabble interface and start with a direct copy of a message that has been posted to R-help in the past, therefore looking like a legitimate post. The spam message then requires the reader to click on a link back to Nabble to read the remainder of the message. If these links are followed then the reader will eventually find themselves on a web-page full of advertisements rather than the discussion that they had been lead to believe they would be viewing. The rate of these spam messages has been increasing to the point where if nothing were done, the job of moderating the list would grow beyond what the volunteers would be able to reasonably handle and would become a full time job. The messages typically arrive in batches, on occasion more than 20 at a time, and there have been dozens recently. So in response the spam filters have been strengthened to automatically reject these spam messages before human moderation. If you do not use the Nabble interface then this should have no effect on your enjoyment of R-help (other than keeping you from seeing these spam messages). A side effect of the increased spam filter is that legitimate messages sent via Nabble will be caught by the filter and automatically rejected. We recognize that this will be inconvenient for Nabble users, but until Nabble fixes their interface to prevent their service being used to spam in this way we do not see any reasonable alternatives. We strongly suggest that posts to R-help be done directly through e-mail rather than using the Nabble interface. Reading the posts via Nabble should not be affected, only the sending of e-mails to the list. One option for Nabble users is to subscribe an e-mail address to the list (see the link at the bottom of this and all R-help e-mails) with the option to receive no e-mails from the list. This way the user can send e-mails to the list using that e-mail address directly, but will not receive e-mail directly from the list and can continue to read R-help via the Nabble interface. Martin Maechler, in the name of the volunteer R Help moderators.