[Mailman-Users] spam, spamcop and mailman moderation

[Brad Knowles]

At 9:07 AM -0800 11/10/06, Dragon wrote:

>  This begs the question, why can you NOT afford to filter some lists?

You must not recognize the name.  Gadi is not quite as well known in 
the security field as Bruce Schneier, but he's close.


I recognize the name, and I understand the pain that Gadi is going 
through.  He's running some mailing lists (many of which are 
private/by-invitation-only, I'm sure), where people discuss a variety 
of security-related topics, including things like botnet infections, 
the types of messages that the botnet members will send out, etc....

In other words, a great deal of the content of certain lists would 
look pretty much exactly like spam to a dumb tool like SpamAssassin, 
because it *is* spam.  Well, it's actually a discussion *about* spam, 
with real-world examples.


The real problem here is how do you run a mailing list system where 
Internet security professionals with twenty or thirty years of 
experience can get together and intelligently discuss a variety of 
subjects (including spam), while being able to protect that list 
against modern types of abuse.

I'm not sure you can do that with the typical types of "dumb" tools 
that are normally discussed on mailing lists like this.  SpamAssassin 
(or something like it) is more than enough for 99.99999% of the 
people out there, but if you really are one of those "beyond six 
sigma" types, what do you do?

>  I've found that since we implemented gray-listing and spam-assassin
>  and ClamAV on my server, I get maybe one Spam mail slipping through
>  to mailman each month. Most times, it is completely spam-free and the
>  only moderation request I get are for members trying to post to a
>  member's only list from an alternative e-mail address.

That's great, and you're ahead of 99% of the rest of the people on 
this list.  The problem is that Gadi is so far beyond that level that 
you don't even know his name.

Hell, I'm not sure that I can come up to his level, but I do at least 
recognize his name and the sort of problem that I'm pretty sure he's 
facing.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at shub-internet.org>

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