As a past member of the listmaster team, this is a goal I have to support.

I did some work myself a few years ago to clean out at least the most offensive images from the archive. And I can tell you there were a number of really gross ones. This was mostly manual work, replacing the spams by placeholder messages.

Since then the listmaster team has implemented an excellent toolset for nominating messages as spam, reviewing the nominations and removing confirmed spam from the archive.

My current contribution is twofold:

Plug-in that allows reporting new list spam from KMail

It's not actually a plug-in, but just uses the filter functionality of KMail. I've documented two alternative filters developed for KMail 1.9.9 (from KDE 3.5). Possibly they can also be (adapted to be) used with KMail from KDE 4, but that has not been tested.

There are plug-ins available for several Mail User Agents (MUAs), with a few still to be developed.

Spam cleaning campaign for the debian-boot list

A few weeks ago I sent out a request for help to clean "our" archive. The response has been great. The work is [tracked on a Wiki page[(http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/SpamClean) and has already resulted in the removal of 676 spams. By the end of this week I expect that number to be doubled.

If you'd like to start a similar project for your own favorite list, I'd suggest you start by reading through the thread linked above.

Update: I was wrong, the number was almost tripled: from 676 to 1801!