[Mailman-Users] Filtering SPAM/ Out of Office

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Fri Aug 8 18:25:46 CEST 2008


Webmaster PF writes:

 > 1.	How to filter out Out of Office replies to the list.

This is almost impossible to do genericly, because the presence of an
autoreply to the list indicates that that member is using stupid
software (it's very easy to detect a standard mailing list post
because it contains a List-Id field in the header, and a good
autoreply program won't reply in that case).  That in turn means it
could say almost anything, and won't conform to any standard format.

You probably do know what format these members use, but Mailman
currently (2.1.x) doesn't provide ways to filter on message body
content.  You probably will get better performance from using an
external filter (eg, your spam-checker) to remove these posts, as
well.

 > 2.	Is there a way to prevent duplicate postings when people cross post?

No.  This cannot be done reliably because Mailman does not have a
central database of users, so it would need a (very expensive) scan of
list memberships to check whether the current addressee is a member of
other lists.  Unless your members are in the habit of attaching "video
minutes" of hour-long meetings, it's more efficient to use a received
messages database on the user end, anyway.



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