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.