[Mailman-Users] Spam to list-owner

[Brad Knowles]

Lindsay Haisley wrote:

> The problem with this is that no spam detection method is 100%
> effective, and with SpamAssassin there's some overlap between setting
> the rejection level low enough to be effective and getting false
> positive identification of spam.

That's certainly true, but that's no reason to push anti-spam processing 
back to the point where you can't use SpamAssassin to refuse to accept the 
message.  Even if you can't get 100% accuracy and 100% precision, you should 
do all the anti-spam processing as early in the pipeline as you can, which 
means putting them in the MTA and not Mailman.

> This solution isn't perfect, but it does help cut down on complaints
> from list owners about too much moderator spam.

There's nothing you can do with SpamAssassin integrated into Mailman that 
you couldn't do with SpamAssassin integrated into the MTA, and there's lots 
of stuff that you can do with SpamAssassin when it is integrated into the 
MTA which you cannot do if SpamAssassin is further down the queue.

So, there's every reason to integrate it into the MTA, and every reason to 
*NOT* integrate it into Mailman.

The only thing that implementing anti-spam rules in Mailman would get you 
(beyond the anti-spam features that Mailman has today), is if the anti-spam 
processing system that was integrated was *different* from the one that was 
integrated into your MTA, so that you had an additional level of 
functionality and filtering with a different approach that would hopefully 
help fill some of the gaps in the approaches used earlier in the pipeline.

So, for example, if we integrated SpamBayes into Mailman, that could be a 
benefit for sites that use something other than SpamBayes earlier in the 
pipeline.  However, it wouldn't do us any good on python.org, since we 
already use SpamBayes integrated into our MTA.

-- 
Brad Knowles
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