[Mailman-Developers] GSoC 2013 - GNU Mailman - Introduction and Project Discussion

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Sreyanth writes:

 > 3. Anti-spam / anti-abuse in Mailman.

A couple of people have mentioned anti-spam, and it's a frequently
requested feature.  Nevertheless, I don't think we should spend Google
money and mentor time on it.

1.  Mailman is the wrong place to do filtering.  It's equally
    effective, normally covers more messages, and is somewhat more
    efficient in resource usage to do it at the MTA.
2.  Any new algorithms *should* be made available at the MTA level
    where they can be best put to use by more people.  This implies
    something that either plugs into existing filters (such as
    spamassassin) or MTAs (ie, milters) rather than a Handler.
3.  Adapting existing filters is generally pretty trivial: you write a
    10-line custom Handler that pipes it to an external process.  This
    isn't big enough for a GSoC project.
4.  To the extent that new algorithms are involved, I have doubts that
    Mailman mentors have the kind of expertise needed to really help
    with such a project (I could be wrong, but I certainly don't know
    much about that kind of text processing, and I don't know that
    anybody else in Mailman has expertise in it).

On the other hand, I don't know which project in GSoC would be a
better place for it.  It's possible to argue that Mailman is a
reasonable place for it, but IMHO we probably shouldn't.

Regarding anti-abuse, we would like to do something about problems
like backscatter.  However, I have to wonder how much *code* (vs
*specification* and *design*) is needed for those problems.  If the
project is really spec-heavy, it's probably not really what Google has
in mind (based on comments on the mentors' list, not on any official
Google pronouncements, though).