[Mailman-Users] auto-rejecting non-member posts

[Brad Knowles]

At 8:53 AM -0500 2006-02-17, Christopher X. Candreva wrote:

>  On Fri, 17 Feb 2006, Tim Perdue wrote:
>
>>  I'm getting flooded under requests to approve spammer posts to
>>  lists.gforge.org and wondered if there was a way to auto-reject
>>  non-member posts instead of sending them to me for approval.
>
>  If you do anything, please discard and not reject.  The from address on spam
>  is almost always forged, and we have users getting thousands of rejects,
>  bounces, and warnings a day for mail they didn't send.

	There is a negative to this kind of behaviour.


	FOSDEM is the principal Free/Open Source developers conference in 
Europe, and is hosted every year for a weekend in Brussels.  See 
<http://www.fosdem.org/> for more info.

	The FOSDEM mailing list is set up to silently discard messages 
from all non-subscribers, and no notice was sent out by the FOSDEM 
organizers months ago to this list when they were opening the rooms 
for reservations, although apparently they did have a private list of 
people who were contacted directly.  People are still asking on the 
list if there are rooms available, even though the members of this 
list were recently told that the rooms all filled up months ago.

	The reason they're still asking on the list?  Because they sent 
messages on this subject months ago which were simply discarded 
instead of being bounced, and they were never notified.


	No, you don't want to generate blowback to forged addresses.  But 
simply sending back a message saying that your post has been held for 
moderation is a form of blowback that is being generated today on 
most Mailman-hosted mailing lists.

	I don't see that it's any worse to send back a notice that your 
message was discarded or rejected.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

  LOPSA member since December 2005.  See <http://www.lopsa.org/>.