[darcs-users] darcs-users moderation: opinions (and a moderator) sought

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Nimrod A. Abing writes:

 > So before looking into closing the list to non-subscribers, I think
 > the following option should be explored:
 > 
 > http://www.jamesh.id.au/articles/mailman-spamassassin/

+1

But ...

It's typically not enough by itself to keep spam to what most people
consider acceptable levels, some human moderation is still needed.

And while spamassassin is a good tool, that method of using it is
deprecated by the Mailman developers.  If you have enough access to
the system (you need write access to the Mailman Handler directory) to
implement that, the odds are pretty good that you have enough access
to use a milter (or the equivalent) and stop the spam before it hits
the MTA queue, let alone Mailman's.  (Which is the main reason why
this patch has never been integrated into the Mailman distribution
AIUI.)

Of course milters are compatible with Sendmail, they also work with
recent Postfix, and Exim integration with Spamassassin is quite good,
too (Debian at least provides a packaged version), although Exim can't
use Sendmail milters. 

The milter approach has the advantage that all your users, not just
the mailing lists, are protected, too.

Note that whether Mailman looks at Spamassassin information has
nothing to do with where Spamassassin is run, and whether you allow
the milter to discard mail or not.  It's just that the milter approach
gives you all the options that James H's approach does, and a lot more.