[Mailman-Users] Expressions to reduce spam

[Cyndi Norwitz]

> On Nov 13, 2016, at 8:04 PM, Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net> wrote:
> 
> On 11/13/2016 07:55 PM, Mark Sapiro wrote:
>> 
>> Or to get more than one tld with one regexp
>> 
>> *.*\.(site|win|othertop)$
> 
> Ooops. Should be
> 
> ^.*\.(site|win|othertop)$

Thanks to everyone who replied!

I want to clarify that I don’t own or run the server.  My ISP (sonic.net) has Mailman installed for customers to use.  I can not configure it and I can’t affect what emails reach the Mailman software.  Sonic is pretty good at walking that line between getting rid of spam and not having false positives, but there’s a lot that still gets through.

As for "everyone should learn regular expressions”... Sure, maybe.  But I think it’s overkill.  I mean I don’t require all my soap customers to learn the chemistry of saponification.

Doing it all from scratch every time also leads to mistakes.  Example: Mark’s simple typo above.  If even an expert can mess it up...

I mean, when I started making websites back in the mid-1990's, I hand-coded in HTML.  I could switch to my browser to see where I messed up (cause you will always mess up), go back, fix, try again.  Now I use Dreamweaver.  I can still go into the code whenever I want to tweak things, but I don’t have to for the day to day stuff (thank God) and I can do things that are a lot more complex because of it.

I don't know what percentage of Mailman list owners are those who have this skillset.  I’m going to guess a fairly low percentage because when someone takes the time to install it on their own server, they often invite friends, family, and people they work with (orgs, etc) to make lists.  Then there are all the list owners using it from an ISP or a server they don’t have a personal connection with.  It would be nice to be able to reduce the amount of spam that comes in for moderation without having to learn a brand new skill or bother the root access person each time.

Anyway, I know you have a lot on your plate, just putting it out there.

Cyndi