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

[Mark Sapiro]

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

>skip at pobox.com writes:
>
> > 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.
>
>That's probably not a great idea as ToUsenet comes pretty late in the
>pipeline.


ToUsenet is only involved in gating mail from the list to the
newsgroup. Newsgroup to mailman is handled by cron/gate_news which
drops messages directly in Mailman's incoming queue.

It would be simple to have it "mail" the message instead, but the
issues I see off the top are:

1. Does the MTA spam filtering process treat mail differently if it
"originates" from the local machine?

2. Does the list accept news posted by non-list-members. If so, you'd
need to flag the message in some way as being from usenet. This is
done in standard gate_news by setting a fromusenet flag in the
message's metadata when the message is queued, but if you are
"mailing" the message, you can't do this.

As indicated in another reply, another approach would be to have
gate_news run the message through the spam checks directly before
queueing it.

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