[Mailman-Developers] Feature to stop spam mail

Nick Hill nickhill@email.com
Mon, 15 Oct 2001 00:27:55 +0100


Hello.

I have been using a mailman list run by a Linux users group, which I am a member of.

Users of the list have started getting spam mail. This is almost certainly caused by a robot trawling the web discussion list for email addresses.

We (the group) are loathed to do without the excellent web presentation of historical messages. I originally found the group by hitting upon the message list using a web search engine.

We don't want to obfuscate the email addresses on messages to members via email. We don't think the distribution of member's email addresses to members by the mail system is likely to lead to spam. The publication of email addresses on the e-mail list creates useful off-list discussions.

What we really need is a way to set mailman to obfuscate email addresses on the web presentation.

I have downloaded mailman and installed it on my own machine in the hope of finding a way to set the system to obfuscate email addresses published on the web interface. The control flow through the program and objects for the pipermail section confounds me.

I was hoping to insert a ~= s/email_address/not_email_address/ RE somewhere in the code to exchange email addresses for another string whilst the web pages were being written to files.

Does anyone here know the code well enough to do this easily? How hard would it be to add the feature to the web administration interface on a per-discussion-group basis?

Thanks..


Nick.