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

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Timo Wingender writes:

 > This are my ideas so far. Is this welcome in Mailman and is it enough 
 > for an GSoC Project? Where would it be best? 2.1.11? 2.2.0? 3.0.0?

I don't speak for the core developers, but to summarize what several
others have said and add a couple of points:

- If you are going to reject or discard a post, you really want to
  reject it in the SMTP transaction that submits it to your external
  MX, not in Mailman.  This implies
  - Since SpamAssassin (SpamBayes, etc) are easily integrated into MTAs,
    it's of secondary value to have them run from Mailman.  There are
    also already such patches, so I don't think those would really
    qualify for GSoC by themselves.
  - The big hole in the current architecture is that there is no way for
    spam filters in the MTA to get information from Mailman's member
    lists.  That seems to be the crucial defect at present.
- You should get in touch with Brad Knowles who currently isn't
  subscribed to this list AFAIK, but is the resident anti-spam guru on
  Mailman-Users.  He might be a good GSoc mentor if he's willing,
  although he's not a code jockey AFAIK.

- Peripherally related, but also very important, is work on the
  backscatter problem.  See the ongoing "before next release: disable
  backscatter in default installation" thread on this list.  However,
  Jo Rhett has sketched out what basically is needed.  It's not big
  enough to qualify for GSoC ;-)  The remaining work, however, is
  substantial, but may not really be on-topic for GSoC: updating the
  templates, working with the translators to get the new templates
  translated, and testing the result.

- (I do not speak for Barry or Mark, but FWIW) As I read Barry's
  statements, this kind of thing would not be appropriate for 2.1.
- It is definitely appropriate for 2.2 IMO.  That would need Mark's
  cooperation, of course.
- Barry has already started work on 3.0 with the intent of realizing
  some of the ideas summarized above by allowing callbacks into
  Mailman to be subscriber info for the use of the MTA, including spam
  fighting.  Probably the architectures of a 2.2 implementation and a
  3.0 implementation would be quite different.

HTH