[Mailman-Developers] Interesting study -- spam on posted addresses...

[John Morton]

On Monday 18 February 2002 17:56, Chuq Von Rospach wrote:
> On 2/17/02 8:39 PM, "John Morton" <jwm@plain.co.nz> wrote:
> > If they can set up admin specific accounts that redirect to /dev/null,
> > then they can set up procmail to drop HTML mail, and say they're doing so
> > anywhere they're advertising the admin email address. That would filter
> > 90% of the spam they're likely to recieve for a start.
>
> And a bunch of legitimate mail, since more and more users are using HTML,
> and more and more systems are set up to send it by default. Not a solution,
> unless you primarily admin to geeks.

It's better than > /dev/null :-). Let's face it - if you're going to publish 
an admin address to help the lowest common denominator of netizen, then you 
can't munge it, so it will get spam. Mailman doesn't provide filtering for 
email accounts, nor should it. So the best you can do is advise admins of
good filtering software, and best practice ways of using it. Droping html 
mail happens to be one practice that works pretty well for a given type of 
list membership.

> > Something that mailman can help with, though - assistance in filtering
> > based on whether the sender is joined to a list that the admin account is
> > tied to. Just a simple boolean is/isn't on the list should be enough;
> > leave the policy to the delivery agent/user.
>
> And how odes that does the "I'm trying to subscribe and can't make it
> work!" 

It doesn't. But you can put all the requests from list members into another 
folder, or give them a higher priority. It all helps. If you need to 
prioritize subscription problems then you could use a feedback form, and maybe
Mailman should provide one.

> "My stupid IS department changed my address again and I need
> help!" problems?

I never understood why mailman wasn't changed to allow users to change there 
own addresses years ago. Being able to add valid receiving addresses would 
help, too. That is also something mailman can help with.

John