[Mailman-Users] Spam to list-owner

[Lindsay Haisley]

On Fri, 2008-12-19 at 11:23 -0600, Brad Knowles wrote:
> Lindsay Haisley wrote:
> 
> > I note that Brad doesn't mention this solution in his reply to you, so
> > it may be frowned upon officially, but I've found it helpful.
> 
> SpamAssassin is one good anti-spam tool, but IMO it should be integrated 
> into the MTA, because that's the only place where you can make these kinds 
> of decisions before you actually accept the message.  Once you accept a 
> piece of spam, you've already lost.  Even if you throw it away, the spammer 
> was able to increase their deliverability count.

The problem with this is that no spam detection method is 100%
effective, and with SpamAssassin there's some overlap between setting
the rejection level low enough to be effective and getting false
positive identification of spam.  I use RBL filtering from several
carefully selected RBL lists to eliminate about 80% of incoming spam "at
the front door" (it never makes it onto the system) and the rest gets
analyzed by SpamAssassin and identified spam tagged accordingly for
subsequent segregation, if the user wants it.  The RBL filtering here is
probably well in excess of 99.99% accurate in its identification.  The
SA marking/segregation mechanism isn't in place for Henstridge's
integration of SpamAssassin into Mailman, but the global rejection level
can be set per list server.

This solution isn't perfect, but it does help cut down on complaints
from list owners about too much moderator spam.

-- 
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