[Mailman-Developers] Google Summer of Code - Spam Defense

[Cristóbal Palmer]

On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 01:08:14PM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
>
> I don't see anything in this story that couldn't be done just as well
> with central control via SA at the MTA.

Part of this involves the backstory. 500+ lists that have never been
in any way filtered, and many vocal list administrators concerned that
having something imposed on them that they can't control will break
things.

Personally, I think it's the MTA's job to reject malformed (eg. bad
HELO) mail, it's SA's job to *tag* mail, and whatever the MTA hands
off to should make the decision about whether to drop, quarantine, or
deliver. That's a philosophical stance, and if it's impractical and I
shouldn't think that way, then so be it. I'd like to hear some
arguments before I change that view, though. My current solution has
the advantage that for any complaining list admin, I can point that
administrator to her/his own admin panel and say, "Play with these
settings."

>From a sysadmin perspective, I currently have three SA installs that
have nearly-identical configs and one repeatedly-tweaked and
well-documented mailman install. I'd rather not make one of my SA
instances an oddball and drop that on my successor. In an ideal world
there'd be only one SA instance, but we're not there yet. If you'd
like to donate hardware to ibiblio so we can do that, let me know....

So basically what I'm saying is that my selfish POV makes me want a
mailman that has nice anti-spam policies out of the box. If it
requires an admin making decisions about which addresses to protect or
whether to do it from within SA, mailman, or something else, then
there's a problem.

I'm still scratching my head on how this bounced its way into my
inbox, for example:

  http://garp.metalab.unc.edu/backscatter-example.txt

How/where do I stop that?

Cheers,
-- 
Cristóbal Palmer
ibiblio.org systems administrator