Re: [exim] Proposed change to list moderation handling

Patrick von der Hagen wrote:

> Am Dienstag, den 17.10.2006, 02:45 +0100 schrieb John Robinson:
> [...]
>
>>That's unfortunate, but ought to be mostly avoidable if you've done a
>>spot of filtering on the original incoming message, and the
>>auto-response is useful, imo. If necessary the auto-response could
>>briefly note the possibility it's backscatter, but disabling it feels
>>like giving in to the spammers, something I'm sure we'd all rather
>>avoid. Has the problem has now reached such epic proportions that these
>>auto-responses are causing more harm than good?
>
> Depends.... try to ask spamcop, for example. Many mailinglists I know
> about suffer from spamcop-blacklisting, due to auto-responses. One could
> reduce the amount of backscatter, if one chose to activate blacklisting,
> but sadly, I'm not allowed to do that....
>
> As far as I know there is only one software to run mailinglists that
> actually tries to do something about it itself, while all others
> (Listserv, mailman,etc.) rely on the MTA to solve the issue. I'm running
> sympa now which allowes to easily configure rules like "allow
> subscribers, keep mails scoring 5 with spamassassin for moderation
> without sending an auto-response, delete at 10 points and keep all other
> messages for moderation and send an auto-response".
>
>
>

Ecartis is equally configurable, and there may be others.

Further - and I *think* all/most other Mailing List software can do this ALSO:

For those of us who have multiple email addresses, want only ONE copy of
traffic, but may forget and post from the 'wrong one', i.e. valid, but not
subscribed, there is a flag (DIAGNOSTIC in Ecartis) that permits posts FROM but
does not send TO such addresses [1].

Loading that DB can be done in Ecartis with a 'subscribe' followed by another
email to set DIAGNOSTIC. Or an ADMIN user can set it. I am not familiar with the
MailMan equivalent, but there must be one. Common need, etc.

Downside is a much larger user DB.

Upside is ability to not have to generate rejection/moderation messages or
*perform* moderation for these folk at all.

W/R other moderation/bounce traffic - I agree it would be best to NOT EVER send
bounces that are not 'inline' with the smtp connection.

I have Exim acl code that can do that for individual Ecartis users in the
acl_smtp_rcpt phase, as its lists are of a format Exim can use directly:

user@??? : |flag1|flag2|..|flagn|

Haven't tried to do it for MailMan, but am certain it can be done, even if SQL
might be needed.


Bill

[1] DIAGNOSTIC for an ADMIN or SUPERADMIN sends reports, errors, and such , but
NOT list posts. As an ordinary user doesn't get such reports, it sends nothing.