[Mailman-Users] Privacy Options Filtering

[Mark Sapiro]

On 06/03/2013 03:21 PM, Cyndi Norwitz wrote:
> This must have come at a bad time because no one seemed to have seen it.


I saw it, left it in my inbox for later and never saw it again until
now. Sorry and thanks for reposting.


> First of all, as a wish list, I would love love love if you made some changes to this feature.  I know many folks do not filter for spam but I find it very useful.  I can add email addresses to the spam list (you don't call it a spam list, but I do) from the moderation panel, which is awesome.  The trouble is with editing.
> 
> 1) Yea! You fixed this one already!  The edit box shows 10 lines of addresses at a time.  Now you've added a pull-down expand corner to the box, thank you!


Actually, that's your browser. We didn't change anything.


> 2) To add a domain name to the list, you have to use a regular expression in this form:
> ^[^@]+@(.*\.)?domain\.com$  (or use net, info, etc).
> In other words, the only way to actually know that is to be a programmer or to ask on this list and save it for years, as I did.


Your regexp is a bit more complicated than it needs to be. This is
equivalent.

^.*[@.]domain\.com$

Also, I think there are lots of people who think of themselves as
programmers who don't understand regexps, and people who have a working
knowledge of regexps who don't think of themselves as programmers, but I
understand your point.


> Couldn't we just list the domains, in a separate box if required?  After all, we just list the email addresses and obviously the software knows how to handle them.  If we had a box for domains, couldn't the software be programmed to handle them?


This won't happen in MM 2.1 for the same reasons as those mentioned in
the ongoing "Custom Pages" thread at
http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/msg62744.html>

I don't know if this will be available in Postorius for MM 3. The
Mailman-developers at python.org list would be the place to follow up.


> 3) To add a username (or partial) to the list, you have to use a regular expression in this form:
> ^username
> That is way easier than domain names but still not something most of us just know.  And it only works if it's the beginning of the email address.


And when is the username (local-part) not at the beginning of the email
address? Or do you mean matching things like xxxfreecredit at ...?


> Could there be an easier way?  I don't want to run the risk of list owners overdoing this, but some spam usernames are super obvious.  Like freecredit or onlinepoker. 


Learn simple regular expressions. There are lots of good references, and
in their simpler forms, they're not much different from 'globs'.

Any 'simple' UI that attempted to translate say 'a string that matches a
part of the email address to the left of the @' into the corresponding
match would probably be unwieldy with too many options and would still
not have the power of simple regular expressions.


> 4) It would be fantastic if we could add an entire domain name to the list of filters from the moderation panel.  Right now it is a multi-step process to do this (and difficult in part because my spam list is so very long).  Again, it would have to be done in a way where a listowner didn't overdo it (like discarding everything from yahoo.com or aol.com because some spammers use those addresses).  But it is pretty frustrating to have a moderation page with, say, 6 spams in a row from the same domain name (something obvious) but each one uses a different username, and you know hundreds more are coming.


See the last part of the answer to number 2.


> Okay, that's the wish list.  Now on to the bug.
> 
> The moderation panel click feature will add ANY email address to the filter lists upon request.  There is no check to see if it is a legit email address or not.  But if it adds a bad address, it breaks the filter.  The filter does still work, but it may not work for all the good addresses.  I'm not sure if it works up to the bad address and then stops.


OK. This is a bug. I have entered it in the tracker at
<https://bugs.launchpad.net/mailman/+bug/1187201> and I will fix it, but
I'm not yet sure how. And the filter does continue to work for all
addresses, even the bad ones.


> I have had this happen many times and there is no warning at all.  The only way you know is if you try to edit the filter box list.  Then when you save changes, it erases all of your changes and gives you an error message.  The error message I got today said there was a bad email address and then it listed ALL of the addresses (and expressions) in my list.  Very not useful.
> 
> I have too many to scan, though I did start from the bottom (the newer ones) and paged up a bit with no luck.  The only way to debug this is to cut and paste the entire list to a text file then paste back a few addresses at a time and save the changes to see if it works.  It took me about 20 mins.  I discovered three bad addresses, not anywhere near each other either, though my guess is they're variations on the same spammer.
> nets.service at denmark
> nets.kort at service
> nets at service-kort


The check is a very simple one, and it only validates the form of the
address. It doesn't in any way check if the address exists, only if it
contains invalid characters or as in the case of these three, doesn't
have at least one dot (.) in the domain part.


> In the past, I've had addresses rejected for having certain symbols in the usernames.  This is the first time I've seen missing domain name places.  I do try to look for bad addresses when I add them to the discard list from the moderation panel, but I get a lot of spam and sometimes I miss them (not to mention that they're not always obvious like these are).
> 
> I would like to see the bad email error message come up when you ADD the email address.  If it's done directly on the Privacy page then leave it exactly as it is now.  But please add a check to the moderation page so you can't add a bad email address without at least being warned about it (better if it's rejected).


That's my inclination for the fix. I.e. don't add the address to the
filter and say why, but what else should or shouldn't be done. E.g.
suppose this is one address out of 5 to be added from 5 posts. Do we
abort the whole transaction, do everything else anyway or something in
between.


> Also, when giving the error message, please say which address(es) is bad.


I'll see if that can be done with only minor impact, although if the bug
is fixed, there should be no bad addresses in the existing list, so it's
less of a problem.


> That's it for now.  I may not have been posting here for a long time but I'm still a happy Mailman user.


Glad to hear it.

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