[Mailman-Developers] anti-spam filter

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Patrick Ben Koetter writes:

 > Perhaps the integration could create an interface itself that makes
 > it easy to add other filters in the future. I am thinking Postfix
 > 'content filter', which uses SMTP/LMTP to send messages to an
 > external filter and they send it back then using SMTP.
 > 
 > The first Mailman content filter could be the one you
 > proposed. Others could add their filter later.

I don't see any Mailman-specific issues in content-based spam
filtering, though, and very little Mailman-specific coding.  I also
worry about reinventing the wheel, with corners.  Ie, why do we think
a GSoC student is going to be able to do something that's worth
putting up again the very effective filters with huge user bases like
SpamAssassin and SpamBayes that are already out there?  Wouldn't a
half-baked summer project just sit there and bitrot?

OTOH, a generic interface to the Mailman REST API, which could be used
by Sendmail milters or whatever else is out there and somewhat
standard (is it Postfix or Exim that can handle milters? I forget),
with example implementation of a milter that checks whether the poster
is subscribed by asking Mailman, would be useful as an extension to
any MTA used with Mailman.

Or Terri's through-the-web interface to the Mailman Handler
pipeline(s), with an example Handler installable from PyPI which wraps
SpamAssassin or SpamBayes.