[Mailman-Developers] Google Summer of Code - Spam Defense

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Eino Tuominen writes:

 > I agree, it's a UI problem. What I'd like is that privacy/spam 
 > administration page had two checkboxes for "Filter obvious spam" and 
 > "Filter propable spam" (or smthng like that).

Do you mean "Filter SpamAssassin score >15" and "Filter SpamAssassin >5",
or equivalent for other filter applications?

The problem is that on "watch-lovers at rich-folks.net" discussion of
Rolex watches is likely not spam, but on "xemacs-commits at xemacs.org"
it sure is!  So "obvious" is not a good word to use.

I think if that's what you mean, a numerical entry documented with

    For most lists, >5 is an aggressive setting that will permit very
    little spam but may throw out legitimate posts.  >15 is a very
    relaxed setting that will almost never throw out a legitimate post
    but will let in a fair amount of spam.  Adjust the setting
    according to your preferences and the results.

I think I would do the UI this way:

------------------------------------------------------------------------
SpamAssassin filters:

If your site uses SpamAssassin to tag messages, then you can set the
following filters based on the SpamAssassin score of each post.  If
SpamAssassin is not installed, or not configured to tag the message
with a score[1], these settings will have no effect.

On/Off  Action                              Score
 (o)    HOLD posts with score over         [  5.0]
 ( )    DISCARD posts with score over      [ 15.0]
------------------------------------------------------------------------

The settings in the prototype will NEVER discard a post, and will hold
posts with a score over 5.0.  I prefer this style because we can
provide visible defaults for the scores.

Footnotes: 
[1]  This should mention the exact SA header we're looking for, of
course.