[Spambayes] deployment for mailman lists

[Guido van Rossum]

>     Guido> For most mailing lists, I disagree.  It's not like you're
>     Guido> going to miss an important message from your boss or from
>     Guido> a potential customer or employer when a false positive is
>     Guido> bounced from the dangerous-hobbies-involving-jello list.

[Skip]
> Perhaps not, but Mailman and Spambayes could hardly get worse PR
> than if valid messages began to simply disappear.  We all know there
> are any of a number of reasons why ham can get misclassified.  All
> I'm saying is make the default setting for new groups in this
> yet-to-be Mailman+Spambayes tool be to forward spam to the
> moderator.  Mailman can say to the moderator, "This message looks
> like spam.  If you would rather I delete such messages, here's how
> you do it, and here are the implications."  If mail just disappears,
> there is no place to hang that little warning message.
> 
> I don't understand why this seems to be such a difficult point to
> make.  The readers of this list are so obviously far from the normal
> user and/or list moderator that our personal experience as people
> who read and moderate technical mailing lists just doesn't apply.  I
> manage a very active non-technical mailing list using Mailman.  Most
> of the people wouldn't know a Python script if it bit 'em in the
> ass.  The other people who help me moderate the list are
> substantially less computer-savvy than I am.  Trust me on this.
> They wouldn't know how to disable the "delete spam" feature if they
> were to somehow figure out why mail was disappearing.

But the key is that *you* are the list's main administrator and in
charge of the initial setup.  So *you* should set it up to minimize
your pain (which includes constant worries about lost mail due to
false positives in the spam filter).

I believe that while Mailman is relatively easy to set up, it requires
(at least) typical mail admin skills, and a mail admin already has in
his/her head ideas about the cost of lost mail.  You seem to have been
burned by this, and as a consequence I believe you're on the
conservative side.  As long as the consequences are clear when a list
admin chooses to enable spam filtering, I think the default should be
for convenience, not for liability.

>     Guido> Given the amount of spam that most lists get, and the
>     Guido> clumsiness (I believe Barry agrees with this assessment
>     Guido> :-) of the Mailman moderation API, putting all spam in
>     Guido> the moderation queue by default would be a bad idea.  I
>     Guido> agree that it should be possible to configure it this way
>     Guido> if you really want, but I don't think it should be the
>     Guido> default.
> 
> That is yet another argument for not deleting mail (and probably an
> argument for fixing the moderation interface).  If you save spam you
> can tell them precisely where in the moderation interface to go to
> make the change.  If the interface is poor, it may well be hard for
> the moderator to figure out where to go to stop the bleeding.

There's no way you can design a web moderation interface to deal well
with manually moderating 200 spams per day.  IMO if you show *all*
spam in the moderation interface, the kind of non-techie moderator
that you describe is *more* likely to make mistakes (rejecting ham or
approving spam) than in the default that I propose.

You've made this same (or a very similar) point many times, and while
I agree with you that it's bad to delete spam in many setups, I
strongly disagree in this case.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)