[Mailman-Developers] anti-spam filter

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Pratik Sarkar writes:

 > Is the anti-spam/abuse filter still being seriously considered as a
 > gsoc project this year?

I would say so, yes.  Personally, I am fundamentally opposed to it; I
think it's wrong in principle (filtering of this kind should be done
by the incoming MTA) and inappropriate for the 3.0 release.  *But*
there is clearly user demand for it, and among the actually signed-up
mentors[1] there are at least two who have shown some support for it.

OTOH, you should be aware that while nobody has a veto except Barry
(Terri has one ex oficio but I doubt she'd exercise it if Barry was in
favor), it's likely that projects that all the mentors favor will be
ranked higher, and looking at the quality of posts from students so
far there is going to be competition for Mailman slots.

If you have a solid proposal for anti-spam already worked out (the
idea the guy proposed with a Bayesian filter based on word triads
comes close to what I'd call solid, see also Terri's post where she
proposed a schedule for the kind of additional detail needed), then
that's probably your best bet.

But if you're looking for a project and you think that anti-spam is
cool but that's all the thinking you've done so far, I'd say it's very
risky proposal.  There are a lot of things we need in UI (both
subscriber-oriented and admin-oriented) that are interesting and
higher-priority.

Footnotes: 
[1]  Terri (org admin), Barry (project lead), Wacky, Pingu, Florian,
and me.