[Mailman-Developers] Google Summer of Code - Spam Defense

[Terri Oda]

On 27-Mar-08, at 12:35 PM, Jason Pruim wrote:
> One thing that I've been thinking about in regards to this... Is this
> job the responsibility of mailman? To scan for spam and other such
> things?
>
> I do all of my scanning at the front end, all e-mail gets run through
> ASSP to scan blacklists, grey list, etc. etc. then it goes to the MTA,
> which in my case just verifies the account exists (Or an alias for it
> does) and then is delivered to mailman for delivery...
>
> Why not run something like that instead of checking for all that stuff
> just before the delivery?

Even if it's not Mailman's responsibility to do the scanning, it can  
be incredibly helpful to make the mailman interface aware of and able  
to interact with scanning technologies.  ie - using messages  
discarded as spam for retraining the system, letting list admins  
customize the behaviour for some lists (or -owner addresses) based on  
lower or higher threshold values than the server itself uses, maybe  
having a way to "discard this spam for all lists" or "flag this as  
spam for other list admins" in the case of messages being sent to  
multiple lists at once...

  Terri