[Mailman-Developers] Preventing spam to list admins.

[Barry A. Warsaw]

Here are some of my thoughts.  I'm trying to temper the suggested
solution by what I think is doable within the 2.1 time-frame.  It
won't be the ultimate solution (if there even is one), but it ought to
be a good step in the right direction.

First, I'm all for changing the footers so that the contact address is
listname-owner@dom.ain instead of the individual admin's addresses.
There's another reason why this is A Good Idea, and why I've been
contemplating this change for a while now: it will discourage folks
from emailing individual admins with questions that really should be
seen and dealt with collaboratively.

(Aside: I have plans post-2.1 to normalize address rosters so that
admin and moderator rosters will be conceptually no different than
"normal" mailing lists.  This will allow you to do some useful things,
like archive -admin/-owner traffic, apply more uniform spam detection,
etc.)

One downside of changing the contact address is that we don't
currently keep Real Names for owner or moderators, so the /only/ thing
we know about them is their email address.  I don't plan on changing
this for 2.1 so we can either say something like

    1. "Contact the Mylist administrators", where contact is
       hyperlinked to the mailto: url of the -owner address.

    2. Like now with a slight variation: "Mylist list run by barry at
       zope.com", where Mylist is hyperlinked to the listinfo page and
       "barry at zope.com" is mailto: linked to the -owner address.

I think I prefer #2.

Chuq brings up the issue of whether the moderators are included in
email to -admin or -owner, and the current answer is no.  I can see
either adding a standard -moderators address, or always including the
moderators in the -owner address.

Then what about -admin?  Currently the only distinction between -admin
and -owner is that the former runs the bounce detector first.  Should
-admin go to the moderators too?

To complete the circle, we can pass -owner messages through the
SpamDetect.py filter, but not the Hold.py filter.  This isn't ideal,
because I don't think there will be time to make SpamDetect
configurable thru-the-web for 2.1, but it does give a site admin
/some/ ability to filter out the most egregious spammers.  And I'll
posit that spam detection/prevention filters really ought to be
applied site-wide instead of per-list.

I'm generally against putting the -owner/-admin addresses behind a CGI
form, 1) because I've never seen a mail submission form that doesn't
suck hard (it totally bypasses all the message composition tools I'm
used to for all my other email handling, and usually never gives me a
way around the form to enter into my address book); 2) if Mailman or
its CGI is broken, most users will not be able to contact anybody, and
to me that is a much worse sin than the admins getting some spam (but
I'll admit that I'm as numb to spam as Chuq is).

Would I like to do better?  Yes.  Will there be time for MM2.1?
Probably not.  Still, I think this will give a better story than for
MM2.0.  It's low-hanging, low-effort fruit, experience with which
we'll learn whether we need to spend more effort to do better or not.

-Barry