[Mailman-Users] options to protect a mailing list

[Mark Sapiro]

zbigniew szalbot wrote:
>
>I have a newsletter type mailing list. Messages from a specific address 
>are automatically distributed to the list members. Messages from other 
>addresses are discarded. Since the messages are sent at night, what are 
>my options to automatically send them without risking that someone else 
>will forge the FROM address and send spam or whatever to the list? How 
>do you handle that? Human moderation is not possible because the 
>messages should be sent around 3 a.m. at which time there's no one 
>around to moderate.


Moderate everyone and post with an Approved: header. The header is

Approved: password

where password is the list admin or moderator password. Ideally, this
is an actual header, but it can also be the first non-blank line of
the first (or only) text/plain part of the body. I.e., if the message
is pure HTML, it can't be in the body, but if the message is
multipart/alternative it can.

The Approved header or body line is removed from the message. The
removal from the fancy alternative(s) of a multipart/alternative
message is not 100% reliable, so this works best with a true header.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan