More spam :-( Was Re: [Mailman-Users] Would you like to receive information on registering your pet online for free?

[Dan Wilder]

On Mon, Mar 26, 2001 at 02:40:00PM -0800, alex wetmore wrote:
> On Mon, 26 Mar 2001, Dan Wilder wrote:
> > There's a middle ground.
> > 
> > For reasons of our own, we keep some of our lists open to posts
> > by non-subscribers.
> > 
> > A simple procmail front-end looks for "To:" or "Cc:" headers
> > mentioning the list.  Since most spamware is too stupid to
> > put these in, or else it is using third-party relay to 10,000
> > hapless victims, so a custom "To:" or "Cc:" is out of the
> > question, this excludes quite a bit of spam with one simple rule.
> 
> Mailman supports this configuration out of the box, and in fact it is
> the default.  I ran with it on my lists for quite a while, but got
> sick at directly targetted SPAM (one which had a valid To or Cc) going
> to my lists and I made them closed.

Which is why we only use such an arrangement for a few of our lists.
Where it makes sense.  No high-volume lists.

In fact, the lists in question happen to be tech support lists.  

The names of the lists are published, but the only subscribers are 
tech support folks.  Anybody can post.  The lists use a "Reply-To:" 
poster, and subscribers use "group" reply to make sure the follow-up 
gets both to the original poster and to the list.

One such list is <tag at ssc.com>.  It accepts Linux tech support
questions.  The proceedings of the list are summarized by an editor 
and published in the on-line magazine Linux Gazette, 
http://www.linuxgazette.com.

I wasn't aware of the out-of-box support for high-grading incoming
mail by its headers.  Time to look once again at upgrading our twenty 
or so majordomo lists to mailman.

-- 
Dan Wilder <dan at ssc.com>