[Mailman-Users] mailman aliases

[Mark Sapiro]

Christopher Adams wrote:

>Thanks, Mark. That seemed too obvious. Doesn't setting
>generic_nonmember_action to accept result in a lot of spam to the
>Mailman site admin? How are others dealing with this?


First, let me say that if your listinfo overview page says "If you are
having trouble using the lists, please contact mailman at example.com",
you should actually look at that mail.

Unfortunately, changing the overview pages to not say that requires
patching Mailman code so it isn't always feasable to remove the
message. This will change in some future release, but that doesn't
help the immediate situation.

You can do other things with the list settings, but setting the list to
reject or discard non-member posts is not right IMO. Setting the list
to hold non-member posts is OK, but then the list admin or moderator
has to deal with them anyway, so why not just accept them, at least if
the person who receives them from the list is the same person who has
to deal with them if they're held.

You can also set some header_filter_rules to try to discard some spam
if you can identify it that way.

The first step though is to have some kind of spam filtering and/or
greylisting on incoming mail so as little spam as possible even gets
to Mailman in the first place. That's what I do for my lists and the
list admins have to deal with the rest. And yes, I still spend an
inordinate amount of time checking spam at least cursorily for
legitimate messages.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net>       The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan