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

[Brad Knowles]

on 11/18/08 1:28 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull said:

> Well, you want to watch out for greylisting.  But running them through
> SpamBayes from Mailman should be trivial.  You could also add (with a
> slight performance hit) a Handler that calls out to SpamBayes,
> SpamAssassin, etc, only when the MTA didn't already do that, or only
> when the message's from_usenet flag is set.

We've got more to the anti-spam processing for our mail server 
infrastructure than just SpamBayes.  We've got several components whose 
function I only know about slightly in passing, and they all have an 
impact on the incoming mail traffic.  We wouldn't be doing them if they 
didn't have an impact.

I am a fan of SpamAssassin in general, but it is not part of that 
toolkit.  I'm not sure how much some of those other components are 
specifically tied into postfix, and may be of limited use with any other 
program.  And of course the host-level firewalling we're doing to reject 
connections from the worst abusers operates at a completely different level.


There's a lot to be said for the simplicity of just having all this 
traffic handled via e-mail, just like all the other bi-directional 
traffic we're doing.

We will have to be careful about loops, however.  We wouldn't want to 
gateway the same thousand-articles-plus per day many times over.

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