Email works on a store and forward protocol. SpamAssassin works on emails in the store part of that mechanism. Unfortunately, email lists are simply a forward multiple times immediately mechanism. Without the store portion, SpamAssassin cannot be made to work in that way (unless it was somehow integrated into the source code for the mail manager.) Now, everyone on the list could install SpamAssassin on their own server, but that's not what you were asking for. If I'm wrong about how SpamAssassin is working (or it works in multiple ways) someone please correct me.
One solution I've used is to use Yahoo Groups email manager rather than majordomo or similar. There is a web interface for approving or rejecting messages from non-members. You can have as many moderators as you want (can get) to approve or reject messages to the list. It's also easier for most people to subscribe or unsubscribe through that interface than through the interface you are currently using.
I understand the desire to use open source projects, but Yahoo Groups is free, and it is very effective in helping to bring this sort of thing under control. I used majordomo myself for about 4 years, and was very reluctant to switch to Yahoo Groups, but I've never looked back.
-Kelly
At 05:02 PM 1/31/2004, you wrote:
On Jan 31, 2004, at 15:48, Kelly Anderson wrote:
At 02:58 PM 1/31/2004, you wrote:
Non-member posts are held for moderation. Most are spam, and easily discarded. However, some of the lists get quite a bit of spam and the admins don't want to sift through it all looking for the "help! i can't get X to work" message from someone who didn't subscribe yet.
So why not just throw that all away? Just bounce it with a "you must join the list to post" message? It's not all that big a deal for a human to join a mailing list... much harder for a spammer's automated computer.
We could for most of the lists. (And indeed, people get an automatic response that complains they aren't subscribed.)
There's also a pseudo-list that's used as a contact address for the German Wikipedia, though. For that we _need_ to accept non-subscribed addresses.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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