[Mailman-Users] misfeature/bug in MM 2.1

[Barry A. Warsaw]

>>>>> "JAE" == Jeff A Earickson <jaearick at colby.edu> writes:

    JAE> In my study of my mailing lists today (both new in MM 2.1,
    JAE> and upgraded from 2.0.13), I made the sad discovery that

    JAE> generic_nonmember_action = 0

    JAE> for **all** of my lists.  The "bend over and take spam"
    JAE> setting.  I noticed that DEFAULT_GENERIC_NONMEMBER_ACTION is
    JAE> set to one in Mailman/Defaults.py, but I don't think this
    JAE> setting works properly.  If it did work properly, I would
    JAE> argue that the default should be 2 (reject), not 1 (hold for
    JAE> administrator).  Why should the list administrator be
    JAE> bothered with having to tend admin requests from spammers and
    JAE> other idiots?

Mailman isn't an anti-spam program, although it has some modest
anti-spam defenses.  Since there are lots of anti-spam programs out
there, it should be pretty easy to install a good anti-spam program
upstream of Mailman.  I just gave a talk at the MIT spam conference
about our approach and will be putting our slides up on the web
somewhere soon (probably on spamconference.org -- not sure yet).

BTW, on the train to said conference, I got working a prototype
integration of Mailman and spambayes, and I'll probably be checking
this into cvs when I get back <wink>.  I'd label it as an interesting
experiment, but whether it'll be useful remains to be seen.  I doubt
it will eliminate the need for other upstream spam catching tools.

-Barry