[Mailman-Developers] Approach for Auto moderation system

[Aanand Shekhar Roy]

> One concern here is that "Thread" is a fragile term in email. Unless you
> are planning on some form of message body analysis to group messages
> together, you are going to need to rely on the In-Reply-To and
> References headers of the incoming email, which can have its
> difficulties. If you are going to thread by something else, like the
> subject, you may find people making minor changes in the subject to
> bypass the moderation.

Yes, I agree ,but having a system that curbs this problem will not again
be a very good solution, for eg. A thread regarding discussion on mailman2
can have the name of the thread "Mailman 2", and for mailman3, the thread
will be named as "Mailman 3". Now ,it can also appear that someone has
made a minor change to avoid moderation but it is not so.
>
> First, these headers are optional, and some mail agents may not generate
> them, and more importantly, the subscriber can bypass this linking by
> creating a reply as a "new message" thus bypassing the auto moderation.

Since I wish to implement this system as a plug-in it will be optional for
the list admins and having an MTA that generates headers can be kept as a
requirement.

> Second, there is an unreliability in these headers as they will not
> necessarily reference the "start" of the thread, but may only list
> messages later in the thread, and to get your "Thread Name", you are
> going to have to keep a full history (for some period back) of messages
> and what thread you determined them to be in to figure out what thread
> this message is in.

What we can do is to remove general keywords like "Re:[ ]" and "Fwd:[ ]"
from the thread and then add to the database, so we don't need to store
all the history, just information about last one does the job, we check
that through Table1.

> This means that any system that ties to limit the rate "in thread" must
> also have a similar (but perhaps different value) limit on total
> postings or creation of new threads.

We do not aim at limiting threads or posts on a thread we are just slowing
it down to provide room to other users. If we decrease no of posts on a
thread it might affect the discussion going on as some threads are very
long and also important and can't be shortened.

Regards
Aanand