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

[Mark Sapiro]

Mark Sapiro wrote:

>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.


There is another issue. Without the fromusenet flag in the metadata, if
you are gating from the list to usenet, the message will be posted
back to the news group. Ultimately, you'd need to add a custom handler
to the pipeline to detect mail from gate_news and add the fromusenet
flag.

I think the approach below would be better.


>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