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

[Cristóbal Palmer]

On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 07:37:29PM +0100, Martin Schütte wrote:
> 
> - hold or discard Messages marked as spam:
> Set up Spam-Filter rules with "X-Spam-Flag: YES", "X-Spam-Level: 
> \*\*\*\*\*\*\*", or whatever. It is not the most user friendly 
> interface, but certainly the most configurable and flexible one.

Back in January I told our 500+ list admins that they could do this:

  http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/ibiblio-announce/2008-January/000210.html

And as of yesterday (27 of March) fewer than 20 had done
anything. Yesterday I ran a script that imposed that filtering on all
lists because we have been blacklisted by spamcop yet again. The
message we were blacklisted for had been tagged as spam by SA on the
list server, but still got bounced out to an innocent 3rd party (who
then reported us).

Anything that makes spam filtering smarter and better-integrated in
mailman is a Good Thing (tm). Providing the *option* to have good and
sane filtering integration is definitely not enough. Even with
hand-holding and encouragement, the vast majority of our list admins
are not going to do nearly as good a job as mailman can do if it
accepts this GSOC project. I'll be happy to provide whatever feedback
or support I can in making that happen.

For the curious, the script I ran was based closely on what's in the
wiki for changing generic_nonmember_action:

#!/bin/bash
cd /usr/local/mailman/bin
f=`mktemp`
echo "header_filter_rules = [('^X-Spam-Status: Yes', 3, 0)]" > $f
for list in `cat /root/no-filter-rules.txt`
do ./config_list -i $f $list
done
rm $f

where "/root/no-filter-rules.txt" is a list of lists that had not
heeded my advice.

Cheers,
-- 
Cristóbal Palmer
ibiblio.org systems administrator