[Mailman-Users] spam gatewayed from Usenet to mail bypasses our spam filters

[Brad Knowles]

on 11/17/08 11:20 PM, skip at pobox.com said:

> It might be easier to get Mailman's news-to-mail gateway to mail incoming
> Usenet messages to the list address instead of directly distributing them to
> the subscribers though.  I don't believe Mailman does that out of the box
> (but I would love to be wrong here).  Has anyone tried implementing that?
> If so, got a patch or a recipe for how to configure Mailman to operate this
> way?

Ironically, we run an external news-to-mail gateway at ntp.org, based on 
the long-existing standard tools in the INN toolbox.  We do this because 
Mailman generates it's own message-ids when it gateways the articles 
from news to mail, and the news reading public for ntp.org complained 
violently.  The mail-to-news gateway from INN re-uses the same 
message-id as was originally contained within the news posting, so when 
people refer to a given message-id, it's always the same regardless of 
whether or not they are using mail or news.

This is related to FAQ 4.59 at 
<http://wiki.list.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=4030712>.


If we implemented a proper server-side read/post interface for Mailman, 
we could fix a lot of other USENET gateway problems, too.

For one thing, we would no longer need high watermarks for article 
numbers, we would instead track whether or not we've seen a given 
message (and therefore whether or not it needs to be gatewayed) based on 
whether we've seen that message-id within our lifetime window, and any 
articles older than the lifetime window would get ignored.

A server-side implementation would also allow us to directly feed 
outgoing articles to news routing servers, potentially bypassing a large 
news reader server infrastructure and being both more robust and more 
efficient.  And we could take feeds from multiple upstream news routing 
servers, too.


But as I said recently on this mailing list, I'm not a programmer and I 
don't have the necessary skills to write a proper server-side interface 
for USENET news to be incorporated into Mailman.

So, I let this issue drop a few years ago when I first brought it up, 
although it does seem to come back up every so often.

-- 
Brad Knowles <brad at shub-internet.org>
LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>