[Mailman-Users] Auto-discard emails

[Steven D'Aprano]

I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask my second question, if 
not apologies in advance.

I run an announcement-only mailing list which has become the target of a 
lot of spam, so I've set unsubscribed emails to be immediately 
discarded. 99% of the discarded emails are spam, but unfortunately there 
is a very small number of ham emails that get sent to the list by 
non-members, which I need to be made aware of so I can contact them 
off-list.

So I have turned on the option for discard messages to go to the 
list-admin (me), and I get sent the "Auto-discard notification" messages 
which includes enough information for me to tell at a glance whether I 
need to contect the sender. Great!

This is the question which is definitely on-topic: am I doing it right, 
or is there a better way I haven't thought of?

Now, the second part which may be off-topic... 

My mail server uses spamassassin, and nearly all of the auto-discard 
messages are flagged as spam and filtered into junk mailboxes which I 
consistently forget to check. Out of sight, out of mind. I've found a 
few ham messages from mailman in my spam folders, months after they were 
received.

I tried to whitelist emails from the mailing list by editing 

/etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf

and I added the line:

whitelist_from_rcvd mailman-bounces at mydomain server.mydomain

where I have my actual domain in place of "mydomain". I expected that 
this would mean spam assassin would whitelist emails from 
mailman-bounces, and not check them, but it seems to still be doing so: 
the auto-discard messages still get spam header lines and a spam score.

Am I doing something wrong?


Thanks in advance.


-- 
Steven