[Mailman-Users] Spam to list-owner

[Adam McGreggor]

On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 04:15:18PM -0800, Marvin Humphrey wrote:
> Greets,
> 
> I run a couple software support mailing lists on a site that's been around for
> a decade or so.  I'm the only admin, and an avalanche of spam crashes down on
> me every day.  

Are they all coming from the same address? 

If you're in the same boat as I was, this little hack might help -- it's 
certainly reduced spams going to the lists I run:

    #!/bin/sh
    /var/lib/mailman/bin/list_lists  2>&1 | grep -i "REGEXP" | awk '{print $1;}' | while read L 
    do
        echo tweaking ${L} | tee -a scripted-hold-list-mail
        # make a config file for each list.
        echo dynamically creating config file for ${L}...
        echo "hold_these_nonmembers = ['${L}@$LIST_URI']" > hold-list-mail-python-${L}
        /var/lib/mailman/bin/config_list -i hold-list-mail-python-${L} ${L} | tee -a scripted-hold-list-mail
        rm hold-list-mail-python-${L}
    done

(if you do use it, a credit to adam at amyl.org.uk would be lovely, for
short tidbits of code, i really don't bother with licensing, although,
my preference is Creative Commons UK Non-Commercial Attribution
Share-Alike)

You'd need to change "REGEXP", and $LIST_URI to be values appropriate to
your lists (if you don't want to do it on a selection of lists, lose the
'grep -i "REGEXP"' pipe; if you don't want the logfile, too, ditch the
tee(1) pipes; obv. if your Mailman locus isn't /var/lib/mailman, change
that too.

> Only subscribers are allowed to post and non-subscriber post attempts are
> silently discarded, which allows me to avoid the burden of moderating spam
> addressed to the list.  But it's not enough, because I get tons of spam going
> to the list-owner addresses.

You could expand the echo line to include an -owner expansion.

> Ideally, I'd like to simply turn off the list-owner addresses and get internal
> notifications (such as oversize moderation messages) sent to a private
> address.  However, I understand that it is not possible to configure Mailman
> that way.
> 
> Therefore, I would like to know the easiest way to accomplish these two goals:
> 
> 1) Eliminate any public reference to the list-owner address, so that there is
>    no implied offer of support.  There's the MM-Mailman-Footer for the three
>    public html pages, which I can hand-edit.  I think that does it, right?
> 2) Create a filter for messages sent to list-owner that only passes mail
>    generated by Mailman itself.

It may be frowned on, but I've wanted to over-ride Mailman's -owner 
on a list, and found that my Exim config will allow this (given the
processing order): perhaps use a more fierce mail-filter on those
addresses that you would ordinarily?