27 April 2002

Updated my Mailman
patch to use some of the newer features in SpamAssassin 2.20.
This includes showing which rules got triggered for
messages that get held (this is the feature that required
the 2.20), and the ability to give messages from list
members a bonus when calculating the message score (so that
they are less likely to get held/discarded). The newer
version is in Mailman’s patch tracker:

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=534577&group_id=103&atid=300103

With this patch and SA 2.20, I seem to be getting about
80% less messages to moderate, which is much more
manageable. Adjusting the thresholds a little would
probably improve matters further.

jdub put the original version of my
patch on mail.gnome.org
(with a discard threshold of 20 — mainly to test its
ability to identify spam). It manages to get rid of the
worst of the spam delivered to GNOME lists though.

With this patch, you could almost open a list up to non
subscriber posting again, like most list admins did before
the spam epidemic grew to its current proportions. The SA
mailman filter doesn’t catch everything though, so list
members would have to be slightly tolerant of spam to allow
non subscriber posting again.