[Mailman-Developers] Possible spam attack against MM lists

J C Lawrence claw at kanga.nu
Wed Sep 1 16:41:55 CEST 2004


On Wed, 01 Sep 2004 11:16:05 +0100 
Nigel Metheringham <Nigel.Metheringham at dev.intechnology.co.uk> wrote:

> There has always been a stream of attempted SPAM to the lists I host,
> and to date, touch wood, its been caught by MTA address checking and
> MM member only post checking.

> I seem now to be getting posts to the list forged from addresses of
> list members (or in one case a list itself).  The rejection of these
> so far has been pretty much by sheer luck (they failed the content
> policy checks).

> Are other people seeing this?

Yup, to the tune of several score per day per list, tho I don't
distinguish between SPAM and virus mail in this regard.

> I am starting to think that my advocacy of mandatory death sentences
> for spammers is far too liberal and wishy-washy.

I use TMDA as a C/R system in front of all my lists and then remove all
posting controls on the lists at the Mailman level.  Given that the
majority of list members never even try to post, this has been proven a
particularly effective control.  I also put mimefilter (a MIME stripper)
in front of the lists to remove dangerous payloads, and then auto-junk
messages which end up too short (this doesn't catch much, but just
enough to glad of).  In 3 years of using this system or earlier variants
of it I've had only 12 spam make it through the system.  Not ideal, but
certainly a tolerable rate.

-- 
J C Lawrence
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.
claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.


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