[clue-admin] Mailman config change --> canning spam

[Jed S. Baer]

On Thu, 24 Mar 2005 22:32:16 -0700
Jeff Cann wrote:

> The point of spam assassin was to identify spam and discard it.  Other 
> messages that were not spam should have made it to the moderation queue.
>  In 
> theory moderators could have allowed these messages to post, but I guess
> it's probably not worth the trouble. 

I don't know why Spamassassin wasn't just sending the spam to the bit
bucket. But I do agree that it seems like a bit more work to get things
all nicely tuned than we can justify for our lists. When I went through
the moderation queues today, I found only a few legitimate messages. Of
these, over half were from list members who inadvertently posted from some
other e-mail account. Of those, about half were duplicates (to my memory),
meaning that the poster noticed the message didn't come through, and
reposted it -- I assume realizing what had happened. 1 was from someone
who is probably on the list, but didn't repost, and I let that one
through. 2 were from people not on the list, of which one I did a reject
with an explanation, and the other I meant to do that, but wound up
loosing it. So the numbers of legitimate messages which might be rejected
is a fractional percentage of list traffic.

A rough guess at spam messages which turned up in the moderation queue
marked as "flagged by Spamassassin" vs. those marked as "post from
non-subscriber" is they're at a 1:1 ration, meaning Spamassassin was
missing about half the spam anyway. Which brings to mind the question of
ongoing training. If it were possible to feed the non-flagged messages
back to Spamassassin for input into its {unknown thing name}  that it uses
for determining spam, it might get better over time. Just thinking out
loud here though, because given the percentages, it seems not worth the
trouble. And if Spamassassin is forwarding mail to the lists regardless of
whether it's spam or not, then it doesn't seem to buy us anything anyway.
Again, just thinking out loud, but maybe there needs to be a procmail
filter after Spamassassin that trashes messages based on the spam score,
before they hit Mailman?

Yeah, seems like it isn't worth the trouble.

jed
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