Moderation of held emails vs. spam
Hi,
I now run Mailman 3.3.1, installed from pip. Is there now any way to prevent Mailman from forwarding the contents of the held message when notifying moderators of held messages? In my case these messages often are spam messages and if the entire contents are forwarded it triggers spam handling in the recipient address(es) which over time risks classifying all moderation emails as spam or even classifying the list domain or server as a spam source.
Even my own outgoing filter classifies it as spam, which I will fix. I currently run rspamd for spam filtering, graylisting and DKIM and ARC verification/signing. Someone on this recommended it, thank you for that as it removes the need for other milters.
I guess that this would be a simple change to make as a kludge but a proper implementation as a setting would be a lot better. I'd like it as a global setting but that might be too coarse.
Cheers // David
On 7/25/20 12:33 AM, David Krantz wrote:
Hi,
I now run Mailman 3.3.1, installed from pip. Is there now any way to prevent Mailman from forwarding the contents of the held message when notifying moderators of held messages?
There is not now any configuration setting for this.
In my case these messages often are spam messages and if the entire contents are forwarded it triggers spam handling in the recipient address(es) which over time risks classifying all moderation emails as spam or even classifying the list domain or server as a spam source.
Even my own outgoing filter classifies it as spam, which I will fix.
So if you can recognize them as spam, why are you delivering them to to list in the first place?
I guess that this would be a simple change to make as a kludge but a proper implementation as a setting would be a lot better. I'd like it as a global setting but that might be too coarse.
You can submit an issue at <https://gitlab.com/mailman/mailman/-/issues>.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
I now run Mailman 3.3.1, installed from pip. Is there now any way to prevent Mailman from forwarding the contents of the held message when notifying moderators of held messages?
There is not now any configuration setting for this.
I suspected that.
In my case these messages often are spam messages and if the entire contents are forwarded it triggers spam handling in the recipient address(es) which over time risks classifying all moderation emails as spam or even classifying the list domain or server as a spam source.
Even my own outgoing filter classifies it as spam, which I will fix.
So if you can recognize them as spam, why are you delivering them to to list in the first place?
Sorry, I see now that that sentence was mostly incorrect. The incoming spam filter (rspamd) does not detect it as spam, but the outgoing filter does (sometimes) as the moderation mail changes to the incoming mail increases the spam points slightly. In those cases the mailman rules trigger in place of the spam filter, e.g. only members may post. Probably bad training of the adaptive filter so that part of the problem will iron itself out over time. What is more problematic is that mail hosts like Hotmail/Microsoft have a more heavy handed approach to spam filtering. Currently this problem is very limited in my case as grey-listing, IP-blocks and filtering catches most spam but I'd still prefer to receive just a moderation mail with just the subject line, sender and size of the message instead of a full quote as that normally is enough to moderate our lists.
You can submit an issue at <https://gitlab.com/mailman/mailman/-/issues>.
I'll do that later this week or next week. Thank you for your very useful reply!
Cheers // David
Hey David,
I have the same problem and was wondering whether you already filled up an issue on GitLab because I couldn't find any.
Or maybe you found another solution?
The problem is when spam is held for moderation and forwarded to the list owner, the mail provider of the list owner sometimes flags the moderation request as spam because it includes the original spam message.
Sounds much safer to only forward a summary of the subject line, sender and size to the list owners and not the full message.
On 3/11/25 7:09 AM, ricola@poivron.org wrote:
The problem is when spam is held for moderation and forwarded to the list owner, the mail provider of the list owner sometimes flags the moderation request as spam because it includes the original spam message.
Sounds much safer to only forward a summary of the subject line, sender and size to the list owners and not the full message.
This is https://gitlab.com/mailman/mailman/-/issues/670. https://gitlab.com/mailman/mailman/-/merge_requests/1332 and https://gitlab.com/mailman/mailman/-/merge_requests/1334 introduce a new admin_notify_held_with_attachment list attribute which if set False will not include the message in the admin notice.
This will be in the next release. In the mean time, you can set the
list's Admin immed notify setting to No to not send the immediate
notice and only send the daily summary, but this doesn't completely
solve the issue as sometimes the Subject: of the held message contains
things that will trigger spam/malware filters.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
participants (3)
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