[Spambayes] deployment for mailman lists

[Tim Peters]

[Guido]
> I just realized that the deployment parameters for mailman lists are
> entirely different than for individual users.  This may be obvious
> already, but I don't recall reading it here.

You really don't read much of this list <0.9 wink>.

> - Mailing lists have a tendency to have a clear focus, which is
>   recorded in the list archives.  This makes for near-ideal training,
>   unless in the past a lot of spam made it into the archives (they
>   should be manually checked first).

Yes & no.  Zope lists have a clear focus, but c.l.py is all over the map,
from Alex Martelli discussing the right kind of water to use when preparing
pasta, to debates about Microsoft's place in the world.  You can't really
can't imagine what a sprawling zoo c.l.py is until you've stared at 20,000
randomly selected msgs for months.

But what they all have in common is ALMOST NO ADVERTISING.  I believe that
makes them much easier than personal email, barring the one-word subscribe
etc thingies attached to mountains of employer-generated disclaimers.

> - Integration into Mailman means that there's only one setup to be
>   concerned about, rather than the gazillions of different ways
>   ordinary users receive their email.

Yup.

> - The person who administers the list can be assumed to be a little
>   bit more clueful than an ordinary user.

Ditto.

> - An obvious default policy with tunable parameters presents itself:
>   ham goes to the list, spam is dropped (or bounced), and unsure goes
>   into the moderator's queue.

Yup.  But since there *is* a non-zero FP rate, and always will be, dropping
email is probably not a politically acceptable option (even if the FP rate
is lower than the chance of a mail-transport screwup losing the mail).

> (Of course, having this integrated into Mailman also gives Mailman a
> leg up against the competition.)

I believe that's not lost on Barry either <wink>.