At 4:22 PM -0700 10/23/06, Christopher Hatty wrote:

I've followed the instructions at this site: http://www.jamesh.id.au/articles/mailman-spamassassin/

Personally, I am strongly opposed to integrating these sorts of things into Mailman itself. This should be done before the message ever gets to Mailman, so that Mailman never even sees most of the spam, and only has to hold for moderation the stuff that you're not sure about.

Basically, once you've accepted the spam, you're dead meat. By that point, you've already lost the war. You have to be able to detect and eliminate spam before your server ever gets to the point where it could potentially accept the message. That means these kinds of checks need to be done interactively, and these kinds of tools to perform these checks need to be integrated into the MTA -- not Mailman.

If a message is detected as spam, it is sent to the moderation queue, even if that message would otherwise have been discarded.

Has anyone else run into this and managed to find a workaround?

IIRC, Mailman 2.1.6 brought in a new feature whereby you could cause rules to fire that would result in messages being rejected or discarded before the message was checked to see if it was sent by a member, which would trigger the other typical rules that would result in a message being held for moderation.

But 2.1.6 had some security holes, and there were other problems with 2.1.7 and 2.1.8, so 2.1.9 is now out. Try that version, and if you can't get that to work, let us know what problems you're having and maybe we can help.

-- Brad Knowles, <brad@shub-internet.org>

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Christopher Hatty wrote:

I've followed the instructions at this site: http://www.jamesh.id.au/articles/mailman-spamassassin/

It works wonderfully, with one caveat.

If a message is detected as spam, it is sent to the moderation queue, even if that message would otherwise have been discarded.

According to the web site you reference, the SpamAssassin.py handler recognizes the following mm_cfg.py settings:

SPAMASSASSIN_HOST The host spamd is running on. A string in hostname:port format. SPAMASSASSIN_DISCARD_SCORE If a message receives a score above this limit, the message will be discarded without moderation. The default value for this variable is 10. SPAMASSASSIN_HOLD_SCORE If a message receives a score above this limit, the message will be held for moderation. The default value for this variable is 5. SPAMASSASSIN_MEMBER_BONUS If the message was sent by a member of the list, an adjustment can be performed on the score. This makes it less likely that a message claiming to come from a list member will be held for moderation. The default value for this variable is 2.

Are you saying that messages with SpamAssassin score greater than SPAMASSASSIN_DISCARD_SCORE are being held and not discarded, or just that messages with SpamAssassin score between SPAMASSASSIN_HOLD_SCORE and SPAMASSASSIN_DISCARD_SCORE that would be discarded for other reasons are held instead?

If the latter, as you recognize ...

Has anyone else run into this and managed to find a workaround?

At present, my plan is to simply use a custom global pipeline for each list.

You can control the order of tests by the order of the pipeline. If you want the SpamAssassin tests and actions to be done after those of Moderate and Hold, just put SpamAssassin after Hold in GLOBAL_PIPELINE. There's no need to have a per-list pipeline. Instead of putting SpamAssassin between SpamDetect and Approve by putting

GLOBAL_PIPELINE.insert(1, 'SpamAssassin')

in mm_cfg.py, put it between Hold and MimeDel with

GLOBAL_PIPELINE.insert(GLOBAL_PIPELINE.index('MimeDel'), 'SpamAssassin')

See <http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq04.067.htp>.

-- Mark Sapiro <msapiro@value.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan