[Mailman-Users] Privacy Options Filtering

[Cyndi Norwitz]

On Jun 3, 2013, at 5:00 PM, Mark Sapiro wrote:

> 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.

Thanks for your reply.  I'm sorry I didn't see it sooner.  I just now checked my mailbox where I filter this list.


>> 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.

LOL!  

Well maybe it is but YOU are the one who told me to use it.  Years ago.  (or possibly someone else on a thread that you contributed to as well)

> This is equivalent.
> 
> ^.*[@.]domain\.com$

Since I just cut and paste the relevant parts, I'm not sure it matters.

>> 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>

Okay, so if I understand the thread… you're saying what might look like a simple change to me is actually extremely complex, in part because of the necessity for translation into several dozen languages.  And that MM is about to change to a completely new version so you are (understandably) unwilling to make non-urgent changes to the current version.  That sounds reasonable.

> 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.

Nodding.

>> 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@…?

Yes.  Also domain names do things like …@xxxfreecredit.com (or net or org or ru or 100 other choices).  In other words, the extra characters can be at the beginning of the username, at the beginning of the domain name, or in the domain location.  Of course the extra characters can all be in the middle or end of the string too.

>> 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'.

So what you're saying that what I want here is already available, I just need to learn how to do it?

> 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.

Okay.

>> 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.

Ahhh…I know I can do it if I edit the privacy page directly.  What I want is for these to be lumped together on the moderation page.  So I don't have to go to the admin page, go to privacy, go to the proper place, and hand edit in a new domain name.  Because I can't guess what phrase spammers are going to use next for their domain name variations.

>> 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.

Wonderful, thanks.

> 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.

Ideally it would accept the good addresses and reject the bad one and say which address was rejected and why.  But I would accept a total rejection as a solution if the former one was too much of a PITA to implement.  Even though it might mean repeating a couple minutes worth of work.  One note: the page allows you to discard an attempted post without putting the return address into a filter.  If I don't check a filter button when I discard a message, the message will simply disappear when i save the changes.  My concern is that I might lose the opportunity to add good addresses to the filter if the entire set is rejected.  I typically have 20-30 spam posts when I go through moderation (once a week or so since almost everyone on the mailing list is unmoderated (only newbies and a couple select individuals are on moderation)).

Another in-between solution might be to reject the "save changes" because there is an error but not partially process the messages or reset the button settings.  Ideally it would say what the error was.  This might be harder to program than the other ways, I don't really know.  My preference would be not to lose my work, however that manifests itself.  But whatever it takes to keep bad addresses out of the filter, that's the most important part.

>> 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.

Nodding.

>> 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.

:-)

I'm looking forward to the changes and to Version 3.  Lord only knows when I'll get to see any of it since, as you might recall, I don't run Mailman myself, I have it through my ISP.  And they only upgrade when a new version is out of beta (and they think about it).

Thanks for all your help and for your excellent program!
Cyndi