[Mailman-Users] Mailman and spam

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

>>>>> "Brad" == Brad Knowles <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org> writes:

    >> Now I want that these mails addressed to mailing lists are
    >> deleted by mailman and not held for approval.

    Brad> 	It's better to do this before the message gets to
    Brad> Mailman.  How you do that will depend on your MTA, your mail
    Brad> message scanning system, etc....

Is this necessarily true?  On some systems (my lists' host, for one),
the dominating cost of spam is network bandwidth.  Disk I/O and CPU
are way behind.  So yes, if we can stop spam before we see the
content, we win big.  But as I understand it, even sendmail milters
read the whole message before making a decision.  So our costs remain
basically the same as long as the spam is caught somewhere in the
pipeline.

On the other hand, some of our lists have very different requirements
for spam-filtering than others.  For example, obviously our Japanese
lists can't hold charset=ISO-2022-JP messages, whereas many of our
other lists /dev/null them!  So I prefer to keep such special case
configuration with the rest of the list configuration.

Am I missing something?  I agree that every list admin should consider
what they can do to reject spam as early in the pipeline as possible,
but even in the case of counting Spamassassin ****s one might want to
configure different lists differently.

-- 
School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
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              ask what your business can "do for" free software.