[Mailman-Users] How to stop spam emails

[Cyndi Norwitz]

   From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at xemacs.org>
   Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2007 08:24:32 +0900

   Almost.  If you worry about false positives, you can ask them to make
   sure that the "spam level header" which gives a "spamminess rating"
   according to the number of stars (eg, X-Spam-Level: ********** is a 10)
   is enabled.  Then you can add a discard filter for "^X-Spam-Level:
   \*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*" to your Mailman configuration which nukes all
   posts with level 10 spamminess or more, and a hold filter to
   "^X-Spam-Level: \*\*\*\*\*" which holds posts with level 5 or more for
   moderation.  Tune the number of stars to fit your experience.

But this isn't useful to me.  Oh, I'm sure some of the really bad spam
would go away, but this is a health list and so there are *a lot* of false
positives because we mention a lot of spam-like keywords.  So I'd have to
set the spam level pretty high.

A couple of months post-migration, I expect that the majority of my list
members will be off moderation.  Their posts will go through in what
amounts to a whitelist.  The rest will be moderated.

The spam sent to the posting address will be in my moderation window.
Mixed with the legit posts.  That is the problem.  Saying "this is spam so
I'm sending it to you for moderation" is not helpful.  The stuff is already
in moderation.  

I also don't want any member's mail that is not moderated to be marked spam
and held for moderation.  Given the nature of the list, this could easily
be 5-10% of all legit posts.  I do want the administriva filter on, but
that's already working okay.

Here's what I want:

Subscribers who are unmoderated to be whitelisted.
Non-subscribers who I have set to auto-accept to be whitelisted.
Potential spam from the moderated box to be sent to my graymail (my ISP's
  name (or maybe a common name, I don't know) for suspected spam--they send
  an email each night with the from and subject headers).

So, yes, I do want the spam filter to run through Mailman.  But I will
accept a spam filter from an earlier server if I can whitelist easily,
though it won't be very helpful to me.

Cyndi