[Mailman-Users] How to stop spam emails

[Cyndi Norwitz]

   Date: Sun, 9 Dec 2007 21:34:45 -0800
   From: Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>

   How about rejecting or discarding non-member posts instead of holding
   them. does that help?

If the spam problem is too great, I may have to disallow non-member posts
except for people who write me asking to be put on an approved list.  I
have several regular posters who are not subscribers by their own choice
(their posts are generally newsletters).  My preference is to allow
non-member posts but moderate them (except for the few I put an auto-allow
on). 

   >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.

No.  I said I don't want my unmoderated members to get their posts held due
to having keywords that match spam.  Spam filters always have false
positives.  In my experience, SA has a ton of false positives on my list
posts.  Spam filters are very useful but I don't want to rely on them
100%. 

   >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.

If the spam filter works on the mail server, then it will screen all the
posts, not just the ones held for moderation.

   >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.

Yes, that is acceptable, if I can access them.  But I don't want spam to be
left in my moderation box.

   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).

I agree.  There is no easy way I see of doing what I want.  I guess I need
to see what all the options are and play with it for a while and see what
my ISP does.

Thanks,
Cyndi