[Mailman-Users] Silently discarding non-member posts

[mailman at tux.org]

On Tue, 15 Oct 2002, Mark Goodge wrote:

> > > > One thing that makes all this more awkward to deal with is the
> > > > number of non-member (spam) posts that end up in the admin
> > > > queues waiting to be discarded.
> >
> >Another approach is to stop spam where it should be stopped: before
> >or at the MTA.
>
> From Mailman's point of view, though, the origin of the email is
> irrelevant. It doesn't matter whether it's "genuine" spam, a
> mistaken attempt to contact the list administrator by using the list
> address instead of the admin address, a member trying to post with
> the wrong address, or whatever. All of these are non-member posts,
> and all of them get treated exactly the same - that is, they are
> discarded without replies. A pre-list spam filter will deal with
> some of it, but not all of it.

I must have misunderstood your original post.  I read your original
post to say, essentially, "I have a lot of administrative requests to
deal with every day, and I could deal with them more efficiently if
I did not have to bother with all the spam that is commingled in
among them; I would like the spam to never reach the administrative
queue."

And, by "spam" I thought you meant genuine spam, not just "unwanted
e-mail".  (Spam, of course, is just one particular kind of unwanted
e-mail.  Some unwanted e-mail is just a part of life; unwanted e-mail
from list members who could use an additional clue or two is a part of
life as a list owner.)  I personally favor taking the opportunity to
provide the necessary clue, but I suppose having one's posts disappear
into the void provides -some- sort of feedback.  (But, in my experience,
it almost always leads to follow-up messages, often including accusations
that service is poor, or something is broken, or the sys-admins don't
know what they are doing, etc.)  I -do- see a place for automatically
discarding anything that would otherwise require administrative action,
but I personally would reserve this feature for one-way (newsletter)
lists and the like.

The other replies to your post should prove very helpful in
implementing the automatic discarding that you seek.

- Andrew

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