[NCLUG] The new cruelty.

[Bob Proulx]

Sean Reifschneider wrote:
> I, after a brief conference with dangerjim, have built and enabled a
> Postfix external policy filter that rejects any incoming messages at SMTP
> time which have a sender address which is not subscribed to the mailing
> list.  This means that the sender has to deal with it, not the list admin.
> Yay!

I use Mailman a lot and yet I know little about its internal
operation.  I thought that one of the settings was the ability to
Accept, Hold, Reject, and Discard messages from non-subscribers.  How
does this help?  Oh!  I just answered my own question.

 * Accept -- Puts spam on the mailing list.
 * Hold -- List admin must handle it manually.
 * Reject -- Become a spam source and get listed in RBLs.
 * Discard -- Ignore the problem.

Aha!  The previous best was Discard to avoid creating backscatter but
that does not punish the offending site that is spamming in any way
and it does not provide feedback when people post from an address that
is not subscribed and won't be allowed on the list.

Very nice!

Bob