[Mailman-Users] Mailman and SpamAssassin

[Brad Knowles]

At 9:00 AM -0500 2006-07-26, Catherine Maxwell wrote:

>  I would like to hear feedback about any issues that may be caused by
>  using SpamAssassin on a Mailman server. Spam is getting out of
>  control and the spammers are hitting the listname-owner and
>  listname-request addresses hard. We need to get this under control
>  but we are getting mixed reviews here about using SpamAssassin with
>  Mailman so I thought that I would ask you guys. Can you give me your
>  feelings about this? If it is not a good idea, could you suggest an
>  alternate method to get the job done? Thanks.

Don't integrate SpamAssassin into Mailman.  Integrate it into your 
MTA instead.  That way you'll catch spam before it hits Mailman. 
Make sure to have a separate instance of the MTA which does not 
integrate SpamAssassin, so that you can use that for sending outbound 
e-mail.

If you don't use SpamAssassin, then use SpamBayes, D-SPAM, or 
something else that is adaptive and uses Bayesian-style rules based 
classification.  You may also want to incorporate some spam scoring 
methods such as dcc, Vipul's Razor, or Pyzor, which can then be fed 
into your adaptive rules-based system.

You should also seriously consider whether you want just the 
anti-spam system, or if you want to make that a part of a larger 
anti-crap framework, which would also include anti-virus scanning, 
etc....  In that case, SpamAssassin (or whatever) would become one 
part of a tool like amavisd-new, but also running under amavisd-new 
would be other parts like ClamAV or other anti-virus scanning 
systems, etc....


But don't try to integrate all this stuff into Mailman.  Do it in the 
MTA, before those messages get to Mailman.  We do this kind of thing 
at python.org for all the mailing lists hosted there (including 
mailman-users and mailman-developers), although for historical 
reasons we use SpamBayes instead of SpamAssassin.


If you go through the FAQ on this subject, you should get pretty good advice.

-- 
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

  Founding Individual Sponsor of LOPSA.  See <http://www.lopsa.org/>.