[Mailman-Users] excessive bounce notifications..

[Bill Christensen]

At 7:48 AM -0700 5/18/08, Mark Sapiro wrote:
>Stefan Förster wrote:
>
>>* Khalil Abbas <khillo100 at hotmail.com> wrote:
>>>  I recieve over 2000 messages from mailman-bounces every day with
>>>  subject: Uncaught bounce notification.. and when opening any message
>>>  it's nothing but another Spam Ad about pills or shoes or other
>>>  stuff.. how can I stop these ADs from being sent to my Admin email?
>>>  it's becoming a real pain as it takes forever to download to the
>>>  inbox.. on the other hand, I don't want to disable the notification
>>>  because sometimes it might be a bounce that mailman couldn't detect
>>>  so I remove it manually from the list ..
>>
>>If you do not wan't to disable those notifications in Mailman, the
>>easiest way seems to filter the messages bevor they are delivered to
>>mailman. This probably involves some configuration in your MTA - but
>>have you tried out the "Spam Filtering" options in your admin
>>webinterface?
>
>
>Mailman's spam filters only apply to mail to the list and list-owner
>addresses. They don't apply to mail to -bounces.
>
>The remainder of Stefan's advice is good.
>

If the original mail was sent to the list address 
by a non-member and bounced with an autoreply, 
would the spam filter have been applied?  Is the 
filter only applied after the message passes a 
member/non-member test?

My guess is that there's message rejection going 
on: the spam is coming to the list address, 
bouncing out as being from non member addresses, 
and bouncing back to the -bounce address.   If 
that's the case, stop autoreplying to non member 
mail - or teach your moderators to discard rather 
than reject.

Spam filtering before it gets to Mailman is still probably the best choice.

-- 
Bill Christensen
<http://greenbuilder.com/contact/>

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