[NCLUG] The new cruelty.

[DJ Eshelman]

I'm wondering along these lines - I have a mailman group set up to only
accept mail from two people, everything else is auto-discarded.  The problem
is that they posted the email for the group on their website and so now it's
getting spammed like crazy....  but instead of me getting moderator
requests, I'm getting auto-discard notifications (in the tune of about 20-50
per day).  I have Thunderbird filtering these directly to trash, but that
doesn't always help when checking mail elsewhere.

Am I missing a setting somewhere ... or is this what you are talking about,
Sean?

I'm pretty sure the server this list is on is a cPanel box using sendmail
(groan) but I'm ready to move it off to a postfix-enabled server if it'll
help pre-filter.

-DJ


On 10/28/06, Bob Proulx <bob at proulx.com> wrote:
>
> 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
> _______________________________________________
> NCLUG mailing list       NCLUG at nclug.org
>
> To unsubscribe, subscribe, or modify
> your settings, go to:
> http://www.nclug.org/mailman/listinfo/nclug
>