At 16:45 2003/02/11 +0000, Colm Buclkey mentioned:
On Tue 11 Feb 2003 16:15, Charles Bartels wrote:
It would be nice if the administrator of this list put in some spam control. It's getting a bit ridiculous.
Speaking as the administrator of a largish list elsewhere, it would be nice if people recognised that automatic detection of spam without manual intervention is by no means a trivial process, and that most mailing-list administrators have enough on their plates as things stand.
Thanks for the understanding. We had a malfunction with our Majordomo-with-SpamAssassin setup whilst I was on holiday; I'm only now getting dug out enough to think about looking at the problem. We hope to have things working again in a few days' time. Until then, please bear with us - we hate the garbage as much as you do!
That said, the solution I came up with for linux.ie lists works moderately well - I have Justin Mason's "SpamAssassin" inline with the command to post to the list - eg: In the aliases file, replace:
list: "|mailman post list"with:
list: "|clean-and-post list"where clean-and-post is basically "spamassassin -x | mailman post $1" (paths omitted for clarity).
This is substantially similar to what we had in place before it broke. I don't yet know exactly what happened - of course the thing didn't leave any footprints - but I'm going to work on the problem again in the next couple of days.
Works nicely - some spam still gets through, but you can tweak SA and modify its rules over time. Nice.
When it works, it works wonderfully. When it breaks - well, it breaks horribly.... The fail-safe "post everything that comes in if SpamAssassin can't make a judgement" stance failled broken and nothing got through. At that point, a judgement call was made to remove the SpamAssassin hack and run wide open so _real_ messages wouldn't get lost.
+----------------------------------------------+-----------------------+ | Carl Richard Friend (UNIX Sysadmin) | The MathWorks | | Minicomputer Collector / Enthusiast | Natick, Massachusetts | | mailto:carl_friend@mathworks.com +-----------------------+ | http://users.rcn.com/crfriend/museum/ | ICBM: 42:18N 71:21W | +----------------------------------------------+-----------------------+