[Mailman-Developers] Spam/Scam button

[Brad Knowles]

At 2:33 PM +0200 2005-12-13, Rui Correia wrote:

>  I've just been cleaning up a list that I administer and suddenly it came to
>  me that we could have a report Scam/Spam button for such items being sent to
>  Mailman lists.

	Where would this button exist?  Who would use it, and how?

>  Where I see the biggest advantage of this is that individual mail users are
>  not going to / seldom do go to the trouble of reporting because it is too
>  much trouble. Do be able to do so at the click of a button, would
>  exponentially increase the number of senders being reported.

	Mailman does not provide the end-user MUA functionality.  It is 
not possible for Mailman to pop up a button in Exchange saying 
"Report this message as spam?", nor is it possible to support all 
MUAs in this manner.

	You could add a new "List-" header which would allow compliant 
MUAs to give users a single button to click on, but there are 
currently no MUAs that would support such a feature.  Moreover, to 
whom would they report the message as spam -- the mail servers 
operated by their own providers, or the mail server(s) operated by 
the mailing list host?  How do you prevent abuse of such a button by 
an attacker?


	There are a lot of questions you'd have to answer before you 
could come up with a reasonable scheme for creating a new "List-" 
header that would perform the desired function while avoiding the 
creation of any new major weaknesses.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

  LOPSA member since December 2005.  See <http://www.lopsa.org/>.