[Mailman-Users] Dealing with spam

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Henry Hartley writes:

 > 1) What is the best practice approach to dealing with these messages? I 
 > have simply been discarding them. If I reject them, will that send a 
 > response back that might make an automated sender drop my list address 
 > from their list as a non-working address? Or is that wishful thinking?

It's mostly wishful thinking.  While there are "high-quality" spammers
who cull their lists of non-existent addresses, they do this offline,
not based on the results of a spew.  Getting thousands or millions of
rejections would slow down their spew.

 > 2) Is there some way to automatically reject or discard mail with 
 > implicit destination rather than holding it for moderation?

You could have a second to last rule in Privacy > Spam Filters that
*accepts* if your list name is present in a To or CC header, and a
last rule that *discards* everything (I think that a regexp that
consists of a single dot "." can be used for this purpose).

I agree there should be an easier way to do this, but I don't know
what it is.