[Savannah-help-public] [sr #105659] Dealing with SPAM

[Bob Proulx]

Follow-up Comment #1, sr #105659 (project administration):

Hi Mike,

I happened to see your note while looking through the requests for something
else.  As the author of the listhelper stuff your message caught my eye.

Listhelper is a mail processing robot that responds to mailman moderator
messages.  In each mailman moderator message contains the full poster message
along with the md5sum.  Sending the md5sum back to mailman will cause the
message to be discarded.  The listhelper robot receives these moderator
messages, unpacks the MIME attachments, runs the original message through a
conservative spamassassin configuration, if classified as spam then sends the
md5sum back to mailman where it is discarded.  This works fairly well for
keeping the spam off of the mailing list.

Karl posted a nice summary a while back.  Let me paraphrase.
To set this up for your mailing lists:
 * On the General Options page:
   - add the listhelper addr as a moderator (not administrator).
   - ensure admin_immed_notify=yes
   - ensure respond_to_post_requests=no
 * On the Privacy Options > Sender Filters page:
   - ensure generic_nonmember_action=hold

That is it.  Without going into every detail, the result is that message that
remain in the hold queue will be piped through a
very-conservatively-configured spamassassin, and 95+% of spam will be
automatically deleted after a short delay (usually measured in minutes,
unless things get backlogged).

Real messages from non-members (or non-approved addresses) will remain in the
hold queue, and need to be approved by a human.  (I recommend adding real
addresses to the "accept in the future" list when approving them.)  Thus, you
should pay attention to the once-a-day mailman notification when there are
"pending message(s)", but ignore the once-per-message mailman notification.

The process does not affect messages from members and approved addresses,
which continue go through without delay.

Futures: GNU sysadmin continues to work on an integrated mail handling system
that will be an improvement in many ways over this.  But this is what we could
do now, to try to keep from drowning in the junk in the meanwhile.



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