mainSavannah Administration - Support: sr #105659, Dealing with SPAM

 
 

sr #105659: Dealing with SPAM

Submitter:  Mike Sperber <sperber>
Submitted:  Sat 04 Nov 2006 10:52:39 AM UTC
   
 
Category:  Project mailing lists Priority:  5 - Normal
Severity:  3 - Normal Status:  None
Privacy:  Public Assigned to:  None
Operating System:  None Open/Closed:  Closed
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Mon 06 Nov 2006 12:01:33 AM UTC, comment #1: 

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.


Bob Proulx <rwp>
Site Administrator
Sat 04 Nov 2006 10:52:39 AM UTC, original submission:  

Hi,

I run the elisp-code project, which has two mailing lists
that I'm moderating.  They're very low-volume on content,
but they're getting more and more SPAM.  The only way
I've found for dealing with the SPAM has been to
moderate it manually, which is getting painful to the
point of being unmanageable.  Is there are way to
automate this?  I.e. have moderation via email and
only forward e-mails that get resent by the moderator
or something?

I've searched through the support pages to no avail.
I've only found a mysterious remark on SR #10550 regarding
"list-helper" but have found no further info.

Any help on this would be much appreciated!

Cheers,
Mike

Mike Sperber <sperber>

 

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  • -email is unavailable- added by Beuc (Updated the item)
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    Date Changed by Updated Field Previous Value => Replaced by
    2006-11-26 Beuc Open/ClosedOpen Closed
    2006-11-06 rwp Carbon-Copy- Added karl

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