[Mailman-Users] How to stop spam emails

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Cyndi Norwitz writes:

 > But this isn't useful to me.  Oh, I'm sure some of the really bad spam
 > would go away, but this is a health list and so there are *a lot* of false
 > positives because we mention a lot of spam-like keywords.  So I'd have to
 > set the spam level pretty high.

Heh.  You're asking a lot of the current technology; if I were you,
I'd take up a collection and hire a consultant.  That said ...

Are you sure you get a lot of false positives?  Spam filtering is more
than just looking for "Viagra" or "Tylenol".  You really ought to look
at a sample of say 100 posts or maybe 1000, and see just how bad it
gets.  You might be pleasantly surprised at how few posts fall into
the only-a-human-can-tell range.

It's also possible to tune SpamAssassin by deemphasizing rules that
give false positives, as well as by using the sa-learn tool to train
its adaptive filters.  (If that's not your cup of tea, take up a
collection and hire a consultant.)

There are alternatives such as SpamBayes which may be easier to
integrate.

 > members will be off moderation.  Their posts will go through in what
 > amounts to a whitelist.  The rest will be moderated.

I assume your list archives are non-public?  Otherwise whitelisting is
dangerous (I've gotten spam claiming to be from Barry Warsaw, for
example).

 > The spam sent to the posting address will be in my moderation window.
 > Mixed with the legit posts.  That is the problem.  Saying "this is spam so
 > I'm sending it to you for moderation" is not helpful.  The stuff is already
 > in moderation.  

Yes, we understand that.  What I'm saying that saying "this is
definitely spam so it goes in the trash" *is* helpful, and I get a
heck of a lot of spam that doesn't anything to do with health: stock
scams, counterfeit watches, and pirated software, for example.  If you
can get rid of all of that, wouldn't it be a big win?

 > Here's what I want:
 > 
 > Subscribers who are unmoderated to be whitelisted.
 > Non-subscribers who I have set to auto-accept to be whitelisted.
 > Potential spam from the moderated box to be sent to my graymail

Reasonable.

 > So, yes, I do want the spam filter to run through Mailman.

Well, maybe you do.  Then again, maybe life would be better if you
handled all whitelisting and spam moderation through SpamAssassin.
SpamAssassin *can* do all of the above without being integrated into
Mailman.