Mark Sapiro writes:
On 06/03/2013 03:21 PM, Cyndi Norwitz wrote:
Could there be an easier way? I don't want to run the risk of list owners overdoing this, but some spam usernames are super obvious. Like freecredit or onlinepoker.
Learn simple regular expressions. There are lots of good references, and in their simpler forms, they're not much different from 'globs'.
Any 'simple' UI that attempted to translate say 'a string that matches a part of the email address to the left of the @' into the corresponding match would probably be unwieldy with too many options and would still not have the power of simple regular expressions.
+1. There could be an easier way, but I don't know what it is. The only real alternative would be to optionally allow globs, but that would require additional syntax in a single box or an extra box. Two boxes strikes me as an attractive nuisance, and it would catch some power users, too.
The moderation panel click feature will add ANY email address to the filter lists upon request. There is no check to see if it is a legit email address or not. But if it adds a bad address, it breaks the filter. The filter does still work, but it may not work for all the good addresses. I'm not sure if it works up to the bad address and then stops.
Cyndi: I don't understand what you mean by "breaks", especially given Mark saying it works. Mark doesn't miss much, but there's always a first time. :-)
OK. This is a bug. I have entered it in the tracker at https://bugs.launchpad.net/mailman/+bug/1187201 and I will fix it, but I'm not yet sure how. And the filter does continue to work for all addresses, even the bad ones.
Well, is it a bug? It seems to me that depends on whether the setting is REJECT (it's a bug, although only wasting the MTA's time AFAICS) or DISCARD (not a bug). If it's DISCARD, surely the admin intends to nuke that spammer in the future, too? I don't know if this argument applies to evil characters in the address but it should be true for invalid domains.
I have had this happen many times and there is no warning at all. The only way you know is if you try to edit the filter box list. Then when you save changes, it erases all of your changes and gives you an error message. The error message I got today said there was a bad email address and then it listed ALL of the addresses (and expressions) in my list. Very not useful.
This is Mailman's way of letting you know that you're abusing the system. ;-) Yes, I know you don't think you have a choice. :-( I don't think it would be terribly hard for us to do better though; see below.
I would like to see the bad email error message come up when you ADD the email address. If it's done directly on the Privacy page then leave it exactly as it is now. But please add a check to the moderation page so you can't add a bad email address without at least being warned about it (better if it's rejected).
That's my inclination for the fix. I.e. don't add the address to the filter and say why, but what else should or shouldn't be done. E.g. suppose this is one address out of 5 to be added from 5 posts. Do we abort the whole transaction, do everything else anyway or something in between.
I would say Mailman should (1) add all the valid addresses, (2) give an error message specifying any addresses Mailman rejected, followed (3, in the same page) by a confirmation message saying which addresses were added. Also, it might be useful to *prepend* the new addresses to the list or regexp.