[Mailman-Users] Is there an easy way to discard allmessages waiting to be reviewed

[Mark Sapiro]

Cyndi Norwitz wrote:

>   From: "Vinita Aggarwal" <vinita.aggarwal at un.org.in>
>   Date: Thu, 3 Jan 2008 14:07:09 +0530
>
>   I have a list where non members can post but their messages are
>   moderated, I ave to deal with a lot of spam. After sometime, just a
>   small percentage of them will be good posts.
>
>I'm in the same boat.  All of my members are moderated at first (including
>all new subscribers) and there are a handful that will need moderation
>forever.  I've found that taking the time to click on the auto-discard for
>the sender address of the spammers is making a big difference.
>
>I also go into Privacy Options: Sender Filters to the
>discard_these_nonmembers area.  You can set it up to discard posts from
>certain domain names.  Unfortunately, you have to hunt for the formula
>because it's not a general wildcard.  I had to spent some time in the FAQ
>to get this info.


See <http://docs.python.org/lib/re-syntax.html> for the syntax of
Python regular expressions.


>For example, add this line to discard any message from bipolartom.com (a
>big source of my list mail spam): 
>
>   ^[^@]+@(.*\.)?bipolartom\.com$
>
>I still can not figure out how to discard certain usernames (or,
>preferably, partial user names).  I get a lot of psychologyschool and
>cookingschool @ various domains.


^psychologyschool@

^cookingschool@

^[^@]*school@

The latter will match any local part that ends in 'school'.


>I was surprised to find that this little bit of extra work means that like
>3/4 of my spam is being automatically discarded.  I was also very happy to
>find out that the onslaught of spam I expected didn't come (most of the
>spammers used email addresses from my previous server that didn't
>transfer). 


Unfortunately, it is only a matter of time until they find the new
addresses. Also, I have found that the addresses and domains that are
the alleged source of spam (From:) will change over time, so
maintaining those regexps will be an ongoing process.

I have recently set up a new server with the same domain names as the
old server. The old server used an old version of SpamAssassin to
filter mail. I set up the new server with greylisting (Postgrey) and
MailScanner (using ClamAV and SpamAssassin/DCC/Razor/Pyzor). I was
amazed. I went from several dozen spam messages per day hitting my
lists and being held to about one a week.


>   Is there an easy way to discard all messages waiting to be reviewed?
>
>Yes.  The default setting is defer.  Once you've dealt with any real posts,
>go ahead and click on "discard all posts marked defer" (or something to
>that effect).


Actually, it is a checkbox on the admindb overview page. Check the box
and click the submit button.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan