[Mailman-Users] Mailman and SpamAssassin
Brad Knowles
brad at stop.mail-abuse.org
Wed Jul 26 19:09:58 CEST 2006
At 9:00 AM -0500 2006-07-26, Catherine Maxwell wrote:
> I would like to hear feedback about any issues that may be caused by
> using SpamAssassin on a Mailman server. Spam is getting out of
> control and the spammers are hitting the listname-owner and
> listname-request addresses hard. We need to get this under control
> but we are getting mixed reviews here about using SpamAssassin with
> Mailman so I thought that I would ask you guys. Can you give me your
> feelings about this? If it is not a good idea, could you suggest an
> alternate method to get the job done? Thanks.
Don't integrate SpamAssassin into Mailman. Integrate it into your
MTA instead. That way you'll catch spam before it hits Mailman.
Make sure to have a separate instance of the MTA which does not
integrate SpamAssassin, so that you can use that for sending outbound
e-mail.
If you don't use SpamAssassin, then use SpamBayes, D-SPAM, or
something else that is adaptive and uses Bayesian-style rules based
classification. You may also want to incorporate some spam scoring
methods such as dcc, Vipul's Razor, or Pyzor, which can then be fed
into your adaptive rules-based system.
You should also seriously consider whether you want just the
anti-spam system, or if you want to make that a part of a larger
anti-crap framework, which would also include anti-virus scanning,
etc.... In that case, SpamAssassin (or whatever) would become one
part of a tool like amavisd-new, but also running under amavisd-new
would be other parts like ClamAV or other anti-virus scanning
systems, etc....
But don't try to integrate all this stuff into Mailman. Do it in the
MTA, before those messages get to Mailman. We do this kind of thing
at python.org for all the mailing lists hosted there (including
mailman-users and mailman-developers), although for historical
reasons we use SpamBayes instead of SpamAssassin.
If you go through the FAQ on this subject, you should get pretty good advice.
--
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755
Founding Individual Sponsor of LOPSA. See <http://www.lopsa.org/>.
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