Mailing list moderation and anti-spam filters?
Here's a question that has bugged me for a while, and to which I've never found a satisfactory answer.
How do people handle mailing list moderation when they have spam filters active? For instance, I get a lot of spam in the moderation queues for the Apache mailing lists I moderate. Sometimes gmail flags it as spam, and I can't quite say it's wrong... I mean the body of the email that's help up for moderation is often full of spam words. But the moderation message itself isn't really spam. I'm afraid of confusing the filter if I let it through. I guess this is where an open source system might be better, as you could simply put a rule in saying "if it's a moderation email, don't even bother looking at the keywords". Gmail's awfully convenient though... anyone else out there with the same problem?
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about 3 hours later:
I actually worry more about marking such moderation requests as spam as then the spam filter might start considering the fixed text of the moderation request as common spam content. This way even valid moderation requests might start being labeled as spam.
Thus I always use the "Delete" button instead of "Report Spam" for moderation requests that I don't want to approve.
In a perfect world a spam filter would catch all spam already before it reaches the mailing list and the moderation queue...
about 3 hours later:
I've had the same experience. Sometimes non-spam mail get into my spam. there are important messages that I miss. so, I always have to screen my spam folder instead of emptying it right away.
about 5 hours later:
ah, Markdown, my old enemy. ;) that should be
whitelist_from *-reject-*@*.apache.org
whitelist_from *-reject-*@apache.org
about 6 hours later:
Trusted networks in spam filter configuration
about 7 hours later:
Everyday, when I open my mailbox it's full of spam mails. I don't bother reading them. I just check them all and hit delete. I get irritated, though, when there are hundreds to delete. It's such a waste of time.
about 18 hours later:
Same problem different place.
In Thunderbird (really icedove) I didn't mark moderation emails as spam, and thus the Bayesian filter got confused and let through too much spam.
Thunderbird's filter didn't get upset when I then reset the filter, and started marking moderation messages with spam as spam. And it doesn't mark every such request as spam, so it is discernible with Bayesian filters, although that might depend on the proportion of spam to ham, and the filter in use.
Mailman will do an email notification of pending, and a web based moderation handling, which works well.
Sounds like more automated filtering is needed on the mailing list server.
about 21 hours later:
Same problem. I whitelist moderation mails.
1 day later:
Just the same problem. I get irritated coz it’s time consuming for me to delete them.