Mailman & Spam

[nurseryboy]

Would anyone have any suggestions / be able to point me in the right direction, on how to get some type of spam filter set up for Mailman?

Spamassassin does a good job on normal emails, but all the mailing list emails are unprotected, and the spam is getting out of control.

Thanks,

[chirpy]

I don't know whether the exiscan anti-spam solutions work with mailman emails, but MailScanner certainly does. As I would suspect ASSP and DSPAM would if you were to use them.

[nurseryboy]

Ok, cool. So following the instructions on your site (http://www.configserver.com/free/mailscanner.html) will be enough to cover mailman, or will I need to do more?

Also, is MailScanner a replacement for SpamAssassin, or should they be run together?

Thanks,

[chirpy]

That's all you would need to do.

MailScanner uses SpamAssassin, but in a different way to how cPanel uses it with Exim.

[nurseryboy]

Great! Thanks a lot man. You have been a big help.

[nurseryboy]

Ok. I got it installed and everything seems to be working correctly. I have one question now.. How do my clients specify email addresses they want to block emails from? I removed the SpamAssassin area from CPanel (per the instructions), so now I'm not sure what they do. Am I missing something?

Thanks!

[chirpy]

As the server admin, you have to do it manually by modifying the MailScanner ruleset files in /usr/mailscanner/etc/rules/*

Alternatively, we do have a nice little cPanel front-end for MailScanner
http://www.configserver.com/cp/msfe.html

[nurseryboy]

Ok, cool. All my clients are using RVSkin as their CPanel skin. Any chance the front-end works with RVSkin?

If it does not, there wouldn't be any way to have multiple blacklist/whitelist rules now would there? I'm thinking along the lines of allowing the clients to have their own blacklist.txt or whatever in their directories and call them from MailScanner. Just thinkin..

I really appreciate your help man!

[chirpy]

Despite the fact that rvskin doesn't properly support the cPanel Theme API, yes, we do have instructions on how to use it with the rvskin themes

To answer the second question - sort of, but it's not easy, and to get it to work in a cPanel environment securely would require custom MailScanner programming within the perl modules.

[nurseryboy]

Ok, great. Give me a little to make sure that MailScanner will definitely work for my situation. If it is indeed, then I'll PM you and we'll go from there.

Thanks once again!

[nurseryboy]

And the journey continues.. Haha.

Here is what one of my clients has emailed me with:

works great.
however mailman is doing bad stuff. when i change any other option in "Privacy Options" of a mailing list, the header filter rule (regexp $X-CWS-MailScanner-SpamCheck: spam.* =>discard) goes to oblivion.

I'm still not very familiar with MailScanner, and have no idea what could cause this. Anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks!

[chirpy]

Hi Matt,

The problem being reported in the quoted text doesn't mean anything to me. Do you have a descirption of what the problem is?

[nurseryboy]

Haha. Ok. I'm glad I'm not the only one who didn't understand that.

I'll get you more info.

[nurseryboy]

Ok. The problem is not with MailScanner, but with Mailman. He is saying that when he saves a Spam Filter under Privacy Options in the list admin, and then changes something else under Privacy Options (like Sender Filters), all the Spam Filter entries get removed. So, in a nutshell, the Spam Filter settings get removed when he saves other settings.

This is exactly the problem: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mai...er/001212.html

I reinstalled mailman using /scripts/reinstallmailman, but that didn't fix it.

Thanks again.

[nurseryboy]

I haven't been able to find a fix for this yet. Has anyone else?

Thanks!