[ILUG] Spam and more spam

[Justin Mason]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1


Rick Moen writes:
>Judging from what Colm's been saying, he must be bedeviled by dozens of
>Mailman nagmails per day, almost all of it for junkmail (spam, etc.).  I
>typically get zero such notices per day regarding the lists on my mail
>host.

Installing SA-Exim4 may be too invasive, though. :(

FWIW, what I do is:

- - we don't have an MTA-level spam filter... for various reasons. :(
  so similar to the lugh situation.

- - use MailMan 2.1.x  (MUCH better).   I see lugh is already running
  this.

- - allow "posting only from subscriber addresses" in MailMan

- - all subscriber posts are passed through immediately.

- - the nagmails for non-subscriber posts will arrive at the moderator
  list.  Have SEVERAL people on this list.

- - These mails are now much better designed than they were in 2.0.x:
  they contain commands which will block/unblock/permanently unblock
  that sender.  So here's a good script:

      http://jmason.org/software/scripts/moderate-list.txt

  this goes through an MH/Maildir-style folder and will remember list
  passwords, block and unblock members and postings, in a relatively more
  useful interactive-cmdline interface than the crappy MM admindb
  interface.

- - Finally, for the ones that get forgotten, Ronan Waide wrote a good
  script which scrapes the admindb interface, runs the mails through
  SpamAssassin, and deletes the "this is spam" ones.  Coupled with
  a bayes DB trained to recognise viruses as spam ;)  this works
  well, too.

  (I have some hack^Wadditions to this script that I really need to feed
   back to waider at some stage.)

>I can confirm Colm's intuition about the effect of imposing human 
>moderation.  When the secureshell mailing list adopted that method for
>antispam reasons, I warned that it would destroy the list's usability
>for interaction.  They did it anyway, and I was right.  I've stopped 
>posting there except on very rare occasions.

FWIW, making sure that members can post freely helps a lot; the members
(the day to day community) are not impeded at all.

- --j.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Exmh CVS

iD8DBQFARRrSQTcbUG5Y7woRAlJIAKDgORmY578IPecSX5PkKE0RQo9kRgCfYdu1
Qu/91IU9fBLhisvqrBOWYI0=
=bx6g
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----