[Mailman-Users] How to stop spam emails

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Mon Dec 10 07:44:29 CET 2007


Cyndi Norwitz writes:

 >    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).

This kind of poster might best be served by having them subscribe and
set their subscription to no-mail.  This also is a useful strategy for
members with multiple addresses.

 > My preference is to allow non-member posts but moderate them
 > (except for the few I put an auto-allow on).

Auto-allow non-members are a good candidate for subscribe-and-no-mail.
It could work for the "other" non-members, depending on how they find
out about your list(s).  If people's posts are urgent (at least to
them), subscribe-and-no-mail is not a great strategy, of course.  My
lists are like that (bug reports on software), but I've found it to be
a tolerable compromise nevertheless.  Even people who very rarely post
are often happy to to have an easy way to get that "free pass" (as
long as it doesn't mean they get unwanted mail from my lists).

 > 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.

Please be more specific about "false positive".  If you mean according
to the default setting of "5.0 is spam", you might still get rid of a
*lot* of spam by raising that to 10.0 without false positives.

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

How does your graymail work?  It sounded to me like it was just
another moderation box.  Now you have two, as I understand it.  This
may be a win for you, but I don't see why it would be offhand.



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