487885 - Add spam filtering to mailman's gate_news script

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(mozilla.org Graveyard :: Server Operations, task, P1)

Description

[Reed Loden [:reed] (use needinfo?)]

Most of our spam to the newsgroup mailing lists comes in from the NNTP side, as mailman's gate_news script doesn't do any spam filtering. We should add SpamAssassin, SpamBayes, or something filtering to it.

Skip Montanaro has a bzr branch for SpamBayes support that includes modifications to gate_news, so hopefully that will help as a starting point.

Comment 1

[Reed Loden [:reed] (use needinfo?)]

Tagging as a Q2 goal. I don't see myself getting to this until May at the earliest, though.

Comment 2

[Reed Loden [:reed] (use needinfo?)]

Other useful links:
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-developers/2009-April/020560.html
https://bugs.launchpad.net/mailman/+bug/300176
http://launchpadlibrarian.net/19807882/gate.diff

Comment 3

[Nelson Bolyard (seldom reads bugmail)]

I'm curious.
Is someone making progress towards this goal?
Or is it perhaps the case that mailman's message size limit has always 
applied to messages from news as well as from email? 

This morning, there appeared in the dev-tech-crypto alias moderation queue 
a 60KB spam that apparently originated as a news posting.  It was filtered
into the moderation queue because its size exceeded the limit imposed on 
messages to that list (which has been 40KB for at least 5 years now).

I don't recall ever seeing that phenomenon before, a news posting stopped
for being too big.  Is that a sign of progress?  Or just an occurrence of 
a rare event?

Comment 4

[matthew zeier [:mrz]]

ETA?

Comment 5

[matthew zeier [:mrz]]

Bumping up.  Was supposed to be something done in Q2.

Comment 6

[Reed Loden [:reed] (use needinfo?)]

After some discussions with the current mailman 2.x maintainer, I changed my mind about adding this to gate_news and went another path instead.

Comment 7

[Nelson Bolyard (seldom reads bugmail)]

The changes that have been recently made to lists.mozilla.org to attempt to 
do spam filtering have broken a fundamental capability of that list server.
Whenever a message is flagged as spam by spam assasin, it goes into the 
moderation queue, EVEN IF the list owner has configured the list to DISCARD
all emails from non-list subscribers.  So, the option to discard all email 
from non-subscribers no longer works.  

This is a big regression.