[Mailman-Users] How to stop spam emails

[Mark Sapiro]

Cyndi Norwitz wrote:
>
>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.  


How about rejecting or discarding non-member posts instead of holding
them. does that help? Note that there are problems with rejecting spam
although Mailman has limits on the number of autoresponses per day to
a given user to prevent joe-jobbing. There are also problems with
discarding non-member posts if you ever expect to get legitimate
messages from non-members, but these are options to consider
(generic_nonmember_action = reject or discard).


>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.


So you are basically saying that you don't trust any spam filter other
than a human, so all this discussion is moot.


>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.


You already have these.


>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).


Mailman sends a summary every morning with the From: and Subject: of
the held posts waiting moderator action.


>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.


Here you have a problem because detecting a flagged post based on
header_filter_rules is not sensitive to whether or not the poster is
"whitelisted" (you could make rules for this, but it would be too
cumbersome; you'd basically need to list everyone's address in a rule).

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