[Mailman-Users] Help?

[Mark Sapiro]

Judys Email Lists wrote:

>I am relatively new to mailman and am running about a dozen lists.  One 
>of them seems to have been picked up by the spammers
>
>prtspecials-owner at mail.trest.com
>prtmembers-owner at mail.trest.com
>
>Is there any segment in the software I can change that will bounce these 
>messages and yet allow legitimate messages go through?


Mailman doesn't have much. About all there is is Privacy options... ->
Spam filters -> header_filter_rules which may or may not be effective
depending on whether or not you can identify patterns in the headers
of the spam. The one caveat is the header_filter_rules Hold action
doesn't work for mail to the -owner address. The reason is that
dealing with a held spam message is as much or more bother for the
owner/moderator than just receiving the spam. Discard is effective for
-owner mail, and Reject is effectively Discard for -owner mail, but
you don't want to Reject spam anyway because the rejection goes to an
almost certainly forged address.


>I am running Mailman on LINUX Fedora Core 11 using send mail and Mailman.


At the least, you should have SpamAssassin and a SpamAssassin milter in
sendmail

Greylisting is effective for many installations but has it's drawbacks.
More elaborate solutions such as MailScanner are also popular, but
have drawbacks as well.

In short, you should be dealng with spam by rejecting or maybe
discarding as much as possible at incoming SMTP time.

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