[clue-admin] SpamAssassin for mailman

[Jeff Cann]

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On Sunday 20 February 2005 3:54 pm, Jed S. Baer wrote:
> On Sun, 20 Feb 2005 12:51:09 -0700
> Appreciate your efforts here. And it sounds as if there's nothing for it.

The thing that is working is that *much less* spam is being held in the 
moderation queue, which builds to an unmanageable size within a few weeks if 
left unchecked.  For example, in the 2 months since we went to the new 
server, there were 12,000 spam messages in the moderation queues.  This 
impedes mailman's performance, among other onerous side effects.

So to reduce the spam in the moderation queues was the goal for me to hook up 
Spam Assassin to mailman.  Once we tune the scoring settings, we should see 
about almost no spam make it to the moderation queue.

In the the previous version of mailman, there was no option to discard all 
messages from non-subscribers.  So, on our old server, I used a third party 
script to remove them all on a regular basis.  Unfortunately, this whacks 
legitimate posts, for example when someone posts an email from another one of 
their email addresses that is not subscribed.  In this case, the 
administrator could approve the message but not have to wade through 100s of 
spam messages to find the legitimate one(s).

> But it seems to me as if the addition of Spamassasin into the mix
> shouldn't result in an override of the Mailman config item for "discard
> mail from non-subscribed senders". Sigh.

I don't disagree and it depends on what you expect in your moderation queue.  
If all you expect is spam, then mailman's 'discard mail from non-subscribers' 
is a reasonable setting.

When I was moderating posts, there were always legitimate posts from 
subscribers who used another email account - we had an example today from 
Collins.  For the past few months those were getting discarded automatically.  
Now that only non-spam email should actually make it to the moderation queue, 
we can again approve such requests.

Since the clue-dev list does gets 1-2% of the total spam, so I can see why you 
might think this exercise is not too fruitful.  It certainly irritated me 
under the old mailman version, especially because I was forced to receive an 
email notification for *each* mail message that went to one of the queues.

Jeff

- -- 
"Science can purify religion from error and superstition. Religion can purify 
science from idolatry and false absolutes."
- - Pope John Paul II

http://isuma.org/
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